VPA season ends on high note

Valley Performing Arts' final play of the 2004 season finishes a distinguished series of productions on a high note.

"Of Mice and Men" is a soulful adaptation of a classic novel that tells the story of two mismatched drifters, George and Lennie, who work desperately on a Dust Bowl ranch for the eventual Ithaca of a plot of land and a few head of livestock to call their own.

Lennie's doughy honesty and George's contrasting gruffness form the skeleton of the play, which centers around their dreams to settle down on a little plot of land somewhere and live out their lives in peace. Their efforts to fulfill this plan and the risk posed to it by those around them puts flesh on these bones.

Burton's George is a bit of a variance from the short, skittish character in Steinbeck's novel, bearing a bit more similarity to a shambling, dusty Indiana Jones than a quick-thinking schemer during the play's first few scenes.

Though he performs his role adeptly, his granite impassability and habit of glaring at the other characters balefully from under his imposing brows also gives the play a perhaps undeserved lassitude.

For the most part, however, Burton dispatches the role, upon which so much of the production hinges, with unwavering skill.

Steven Cuthbert's Lennie is both adroitly executed and exaggerated sufficiently for even audience members without any familiarity with the book to grasp his function in the play.

Since Lennie's speaking role is somewhat smaller than George's (due in no small part to the latter's continuous insistence on the former's silence), more of his role must be communicated via his facial expressions, which are delivered by Cuthbert with gusto.

The unlikely pair is thrust into a veritable funhouse world in the guise of a ranch, populated by characters both colorful and almost painfully contrived: the snarling Boss with his preposterous moustache, the wavering, clomping gait of the crippled Candy, the lanky menace of Curley, the languor of his seductive, dimwitted wife, and the slow deliberation of Slim, the toolshed philosopher, who gravely intones: "ever'one got a piece of land in their head, and no one gets to heaven." The characters are believable and effective, though they seem to be little more than caricatures at times.

The set design and lighting for this production are particularly effective, especially in the fifth scene, which features hay-strewn floorboards dappled with light filtering through a slatted barn door, and in the first, which simulates the gradual setting of the sun, fading through orange light to cover the stage in darkness, illuminated by only an artificial campfire, at the end of the scene.

Less convincing are some of the costumes, which feature not only the unattractive cowboy hats and ill-fitting denim standard to staged Westerns, but also a vast array of imposing belt-buckles and a rather poorly designed prosthetic hand that resembles a roll of shiny masking tape. For the most part, however, the garments do a good job of conveying a sense of the earthy wear and tear levied upon the clothes of working folk.

"Of Mice and Men" is laden with the emotional manipulation common to the American tragedy, a phenomenon seen most clearly in Carlson's murder of Candy's ailing dog, an event that is drawn out to encompass nearly half of one of the play's six scenes.

Though executed with skill, sympathetic parlor tricks such as these fade when compared with the venerable play's stronger message, a commentary on the magnetic power of the American Dream.

This philosophy, which preaches the ability of even the most humble citizen to strike out on his or her own and essentially carve a living out of the wilderness, is a dream so often entertained by not only the Depression-era everymen George and Lennie, but also the enduring public imagination.

The most powerful and disturbing image that results from the play is that the Hollywood dreams of Curley's vacuous wife are in essence the same dreams as those of George and Lennie—as ambitious, as ephemeral, and, ultimately, as doomed.

Contact Frontiersman reporter Daniel Spoth at daniel.spoth@frontiersman.com.