‘Best laid plans’
This play became such a celebrated part of American culture that even cartoons such as Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes made references to it. That’s because John Steinbeck wrote “Of Mice and Men” with powerful, timeless themes of social injustice, loneliness and poverty and wound up stunning this country’s audiences.
The novella, published in March 1937, quickly became a best seller and a Book-of-the-Month selection. With director George S. Kaufman, Steinbeck adapted the book for the stage.
It opened on Broadway on Nov. 23, 1937, starring Wallace Ford and Broderick Crawford. It ran 207 performances and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play of 1937.
Director Lewis Milestone made it into a film in 1939 with Lon Chaney Jr. and Burgess Meredith, and it was remade in 1992 with John Malkovich and Gary Sinise.
This week Interplayers brings “Of Mice and Men” to the stage once again, directed by Wes Deitrick. George Green will play George Milton, an itinerant farm worker, and Troy Nickerson will appear as his buddy, Lenny Small, a mentally disabled man living in a powerful body.
Lenny, who yearns to hold soft, cuddly things, travels with George around the California countryside during the Depression, picking up odd jobs. As the play begins, they’re about to start bucking barley in a field in the Salinas River Valley.
They keep their spirits up by dreaming of a day they can run a small farm of their own. But they’re trying to survive in the harsh circumstances of 1930s America, when “the best laid plans of mice and men,” as Robert Burns’ poem says, often went awry.
Deitrick discovered Steinbeck years ago.
“John Steinbeck changed me, actually,” Deitrick says. “I read all those books as a teenager, tons of them. He made me want to be a storyteller of sorts.”
Steinbeck, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel “The Grapes of Wrath” in 1940 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, wrote of the crushing lives of America’s poor during the Depression.
“Of Mice and Men” portrays several characters with serious disabilities: an elderly man who lost his hand; a black man hobbled after a horse kicked him in the back; and Lenny, who struggles mentally. Living in the United States before Social Security began, all were forced to endure isolation and brutal conditions simply to survive.
“(Steinbeck) had a brilliant way of getting to the issue without hopping on the soap box,” Deitrick says.
He plans a simple, straightforward production of Steinbeck’s work.
“He’s one of those writers you have to leave alone,” Deitrick says. “If you try to put any spin on it, you’re going to kill it.”
Audiences will be surprised to see Nickerson, who is known as a director, choreographer and musical comedy actor, in this serious dramatic role, Deitrick predicts.
They’ll also see Clarence Forech as Crooks. Forech, who shines shoes at Nordstrom in downtown Spokane, previously played this role for the Valley Repertory Theatre in 1996.
Says Deitrick, “My whole cast is tremendous.”
This production replaces Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” as Interplayers’ concluding play of the season.
After the theater’s former artistic director, Nike Imoru, left in January, Deitrick was brought in as interim artistic director. He couldn’t find an economical way to produce a play with a large cast and expensive costumes.
Instead, he substituted “Of Mice and Men,” and Interplayers, a professional theater that pays salaries to its actors, has trimmed its paychecks for this production. Deitrick also has found other ways to cut costs.
“At times I call in a favor out of a friend to save a few bucks,” he says. “I’ll owe them later. I barter. I do whatever I can to produce the quality theater that Interplayers is used to, and try to do it in a more economical way …
“Basically, we have a wonderful community of actors and technicians who love Interplayers and want to help.”
The theater plans, Deitrick says, to restore its previous salary levels for next season’s opener, “Bus Stop.”
“It is a temporary situation that we thoroughly intend to change,” he says.