Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck’s 1937 book, which he later adapted for the stage, paints the portrait of the dusty and disenfranchised migrant farm workers who roamed across California during the Depression. The Arena Stage’s production of Of Mice and Men, directed by Liz Diamond, captures that bleakness of atmosphere in the physical realities of the stage and set: when the actors make contact, little clouds of dust billow into the air. However, that bone-crunching sense of reality so heavy in the atmosphere isn’t totally carried through in reality?a serious and moving but workman-like production, Of Mice and Men never attains in its production the dramatic heft of its setting.
Most striking is the play’s milieu. The set, designed by Ricardo Hernandez, floats like a gray and barren island in the center of the Fichandler auditorium. Essentially nothing more than a sun-bleached wooden raft, the comparison to an island is especially apt when it’s revealed that a river runs under the stage. Versatile and uncanny in it’s ability to take on the attributes of a riverbank, a bunkhouse and a stable under the lighting designed by Nancy Schertler, the set is a masterpiece of simplicity and functionality.
Jack Willis, who most recently appeared at the Arena Stage as the lead role in Agamemnon and His Daughters, gives a deep and nuanced portrayal of destructively simple Lennie. Perfectly unobtrusive and awkward looking in group scenes, magnetic in his scenes alone and with Barker and frightful in his rare outbursts of anger, Willis makes a complete and heartbreaking person out of Lennie’s dreams and confusion.
Stephen Barker Turner, as the weary but fiercly protective George, is obviously devoted to Lennie, but the shouting with which he telegraphs his frustration doesn’t sit well with the spare minimalism of the book. The volumniousness of his gestures is exhausting to watch and strangely out of sync with the rest of the production. There’s an underdeveloped current of homoerotic tension humming through the play that centers on the bunkhouse reaction to Lennie and George’s relationship, and finds echos on the friendship between George and Slim (Alex Webb) which makes the all-male melee of the farm community more pointed and which renders the encroachment of Curly’s wife into the farm more intrusive.
Curly’s wife, portrayed by Maggie Lacey, is the only woman in the 10-person cast. Curly’s new, nameless wife is a woman stranded far out of her element in the rough-edged world of the farm, chafing at the isolation her situation engenders. Played as woman who’s “got the eye” for any and all of the men on the farm, you can tell that she’s bad news because she’s wearing maribou-trimmed red bedroom slippers and a pink dress that practically burns in the dusty set around her. Lacey’s potrayal of Curly’s wife’s establishes her defiant naivit? and longing for company, but all but beats the audience over the head with her smolder?she leads with her chest. She could wear a sign saying, “Trouble,” but that might be too obvious.
The play is as a whole solidly acted and genuinely moving, but up until the end it lacks a necessary sense of the fire burning beneath the surface. When things erupt, it seems not to be the inescapable and necessarily-determined end, but rather a mild and vaguely unpleasant surprise. However, in the play’s last scene, an uncharacteristicly level Turner and always-compelling Willis catalyze each other in a scene that careens forward into its inevitable and horrifying conclusion.
Of Mice and Men is playing through Dec. 9 at Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St., S.W.
