Not to be missed: 'Of Mice and Men'
Transcribed from:
Mount Vernon News, Friday May 23, 2008
by Mark S. Jordan
The Bruce Jacklin and Company production of John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" opened Thursday to an invited student audience in the Hill theatre on the campus of Kenyon College. Make no mistake, the production is not to be missed, for it features Mount Vernon acting favorites Bruce Jacklin and Matt Starr in roles they were born to play.
The play, adapted from the famous novella by the author himself, tells the story of two migrant farm workers, George and Lennie, who have a dream of some day escaping the grind of manual labor. Their problem is that Lennie is a big, powerful man of limited mental capacity. Lennie lacks the intelligence and tact to stay out of trouble, and when he gets in trouble, he doesn't know his own strength.
Although their background is never explained, George is devoted to Lennie, and tries to watch over him, even though the man-child's bungling jeeps getting them both fired from every job they manage to get.
As the play opens, George and Lennie are fleeing a previous fiasco. They find employment on a ranch run by The Boss, played with a gruff directness by Daniel P. Turner. They are befriended by Candy, an aging ranch hand who lost one of his hands in a machine accident. The chatty and wizened Candy is played with warm and scatterbrained charm by Chuck Ransom.
That warmth doesn't preclude other levels, though, as Ransom shows Candy's desperate attatchment to his pet dog, an animal so aged and lame that Candy has to drag him around in a basket. The animals referred to in the script are represented abstractly as props, just as the stage setting of the play is starkly minimal.
George and Lennie run into trouble with The Boss's hot-tempered son, Curley, played with seething fire by Chris Guerrieri. Things get further complicated when Curley's wife begins hanging out around the ranch hands' bunkhouse. Elizabeth Vining plays the wife with a complex mixture of cross-purposes. Instead of playing her as a two-dimensional tramp, Fining finds a real character there. Perhaps she is ready to cheat on her husband, but perhaps she's just lonely and bored and looking only for friendship.
Matt Peck plays the mule-team driver Slim as the natural leader of the men, the one who tries to control the situations that threaten to spiral out of hand and lend whatever wisdom he can summon to guide his fellow workers caught between the severe, distant Boss and his pugnacious son. Chris Ballard plays the crippled black man, Crooks, with rich character. He shows Crooks' status as an outsider on the farm, and demonstrates a very believable mixture of wariness and longing as he finally dares to break down his own defensive wall and befriend Lennie.
Ian Ernsberger played the ranch hand Carlson as a brusque, no-nonsense figure, while Steven Crano played ranch hand Whit as a likeable fellow caught up in the tensions whirling around him.
Jacklin made George a well-rounded character consisting of equal parts selfless devotion, world-weariness and stinging resentment. It was agonizing watching Jacklin bring his character to the realization near the end of the play that he must be the one to do something about Lennie. Remarkable, too, with such potentially volatile material, is the restraint that Jacklin used, keeping his character from ever coming across as hectoring or maudlin.
Starr, a massive 6 1/2-foot tall man, had the size to make Lennie imposing, yet the child-like charm to make him endearing. His moments of confusion and panic, such as when he accidentally kills his pet puppy, are wrenching and utterly convincing.
Jeffrey Gardner's direction was focused and flowing, sharpening both comic and tragic moments to full effect. The lighting was as spare as the set pieces, helping focus attention on the interplay of the actors.
The performance ended with a question-and-answer session between students and the cast and crew members. One student asked if Steinbeck was racist, due to his use of a highly offensive racial epithet in the play. Ballard, who is black, answered that Steinbeck was actually a visionary decades ahead of his time, for though he used the then-common word, he also went out of his way to flesh out the character of Crooks as a segregated figure longing for the human contact unfairly denied to him.
In answering what was his favorite part of the production, Gardner said he loved the moment when the rehearsal went off book and first began to come to life. Jacklin said he loved the process of theatre, reinventing the characters and how the react and listen to each other in every performance. Starr said he loved that he was able to bring a lot of life experience to the role of Lennie, learned by working for 15 years with mentally retarded and developmentally disabled people,some of whom were very much like Lennie.
The play runs this weekend only, with performances Friday and Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 2 pm. All performances are in the Hill Theater, on the campus of Kenyon College in Gambier.
Mount Vernon News, Friday May 23, 2008
by Mark S. Jordan
The Bruce Jacklin and Company production of John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" opened Thursday to an invited student audience in the Hill theatre on the campus of Kenyon College. Make no mistake, the production is not to be missed, for it features Mount Vernon acting favorites Bruce Jacklin and Matt Starr in roles they were born to play.
The play, adapted from the famous novella by the author himself, tells the story of two migrant farm workers, George and Lennie, who have a dream of some day escaping the grind of manual labor. Their problem is that Lennie is a big, powerful man of limited mental capacity. Lennie lacks the intelligence and tact to stay out of trouble, and when he gets in trouble, he doesn't know his own strength.
Although their background is never explained, George is devoted to Lennie, and tries to watch over him, even though the man-child's bungling jeeps getting them both fired from every job they manage to get.
As the play opens, George and Lennie are fleeing a previous fiasco. They find employment on a ranch run by The Boss, played with a gruff directness by Daniel P. Turner. They are befriended by Candy, an aging ranch hand who lost one of his hands in a machine accident. The chatty and wizened Candy is played with warm and scatterbrained charm by Chuck Ransom.
That warmth doesn't preclude other levels, though, as Ransom shows Candy's desperate attatchment to his pet dog, an animal so aged and lame that Candy has to drag him around in a basket. The animals referred to in the script are represented abstractly as props, just as the stage setting of the play is starkly minimal.
George and Lennie run into trouble with The Boss's hot-tempered son, Curley, played with seething fire by Chris Guerrieri. Things get further complicated when Curley's wife begins hanging out around the ranch hands' bunkhouse. Elizabeth Vining plays the wife with a complex mixture of cross-purposes. Instead of playing her as a two-dimensional tramp, Fining finds a real character there. Perhaps she is ready to cheat on her husband, but perhaps she's just lonely and bored and looking only for friendship.
Matt Peck plays the mule-team driver Slim as the natural leader of the men, the one who tries to control the situations that threaten to spiral out of hand and lend whatever wisdom he can summon to guide his fellow workers caught between the severe, distant Boss and his pugnacious son. Chris Ballard plays the crippled black man, Crooks, with rich character. He shows Crooks' status as an outsider on the farm, and demonstrates a very believable mixture of wariness and longing as he finally dares to break down his own defensive wall and befriend Lennie.
Ian Ernsberger played the ranch hand Carlson as a brusque, no-nonsense figure, while Steven Crano played ranch hand Whit as a likeable fellow caught up in the tensions whirling around him.
Jacklin made George a well-rounded character consisting of equal parts selfless devotion, world-weariness and stinging resentment. It was agonizing watching Jacklin bring his character to the realization near the end of the play that he must be the one to do something about Lennie. Remarkable, too, with such potentially volatile material, is the restraint that Jacklin used, keeping his character from ever coming across as hectoring or maudlin.
Starr, a massive 6 1/2-foot tall man, had the size to make Lennie imposing, yet the child-like charm to make him endearing. His moments of confusion and panic, such as when he accidentally kills his pet puppy, are wrenching and utterly convincing.
Jeffrey Gardner's direction was focused and flowing, sharpening both comic and tragic moments to full effect. The lighting was as spare as the set pieces, helping focus attention on the interplay of the actors.
The performance ended with a question-and-answer session between students and the cast and crew members. One student asked if Steinbeck was racist, due to his use of a highly offensive racial epithet in the play. Ballard, who is black, answered that Steinbeck was actually a visionary decades ahead of his time, for though he used the then-common word, he also went out of his way to flesh out the character of Crooks as a segregated figure longing for the human contact unfairly denied to him.
In answering what was his favorite part of the production, Gardner said he loved the moment when the rehearsal went off book and first began to come to life. Jacklin said he loved the process of theatre, reinventing the characters and how the react and listen to each other in every performance. Starr said he loved that he was able to bring a lot of life experience to the role of Lennie, learned by working for 15 years with mentally retarded and developmentally disabled people,some of whom were very much like Lennie.
The play runs this weekend only, with performances Friday and Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 2 pm. All performances are in the Hill Theater, on the campus of Kenyon College in Gambier.
