The Royal National Theatre’s NT Live initiative beams theater performances live (or time zone delayed) via satellite from its London stages, and occasionally from other British theaters, to cinema screens around the world. Now the popular series has hopped the pond to capture the recent Broadway production of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
Last fall’s live screening is repeated this Saturday and again on March 10 at Amherst Cinema, which has presented virtually all of the series’ first five seasons, ranging from Shakespearean classics to new and experimental works.
In the intermission feature that plays with NT Live’s Of Mice and Men, director Anna Shapiro refers to the “ghosted world” in which the play takes place—a Depression-era ranch staffed by migrant farmhands and lost souls with nowhere else to go. The play, which Steinbeck adapted from his own 1937 novella, “captures an American moment” and “the people who were left behind” by the mechanization of agriculture and betrayed by the elusive American Dream. The play, she says, is “a distillation of that lie.”
Photos by Richard Phibbs
The Everly Brothers’ “Dream” plays in the background of the featurette, and indeed the play itself is all about the impossible dreams on which most of the characters subsist. George and Lenny, the rootless drifters at the heart of the piece, dream of settling down on a little homestead with a garden and rabbits. Lenny, a big man, slow of speech and thought, doesn’t know his own strength, so that his childish fondness for soft things — a mouse, a puppy, a woman’s shiny hair — keeps getting them both in trouble and ultimately leads to tragedy.
The drama is also about loneliness and companionship, embodied by Candy, the old handyman whose closest companion is an ancient, smelly dog; Crooks, the crippled stablehand who’s barred from the bunkhouse because he’s black; and the pretty young wife of the boss’s belligerent son Curley, who flirts with the ranch hands out of boredom and neglect.
James Franco is the marquee name in this production, and his matinee-idol looks and Hollywood credits are largely responsible for the sold-out run. But he delivers a gritty, understated performance as George, whose frequent exasperation with Lenny is belied by his own need for companionship. The Irish actor Chris O’Dowd is heartbreakingly persuasive as Lenny, open-faced and open-hearted, as innocent, eager to please and uncomprehending as the puppy dog for which he yearns.
The supporting cast lends depth and texture to the production with sharply drawn characterizations: Jim Norton is a rheumy and forlorn Candy; Ron Cephas Jones a flinty, funny Crooks; Alex Morf a dangerously pugnacious Curley. Director Shapiro’s sure hand slips only in making Leighton Meester, as Curley’s (unnamed) wife, overtly seductive in her flirtations with the men, where a hapless naïveté would better serve both the character and the play’s ultimate catastrophe.
While Of Mice and Men spins a tale of men in desperate and volatile circumstances, the next NT Live production drives that desperation even deeper. JOHN, coming to Amherst Cinema next Tuesday with a repeat on the 21st, is a guest production at the National by London’s DV8 Physical Theatre (say the acronym aloud). It’s a dance-theater piece, a tale of loss and survival based on the harrowing, but hopeful life history of a man living on the edges of contemporary London.•
Chris Rohmann is at StageStruck@crocker.com and his StageStruck blog is at www.valleyadvocate.com.
