8 - Of Mice and Men (the play, 1937)

Summary

Margaret Shedd.

“Of Mice and Men.”

Theatre Arts, 21

(October 1937), 774–80.

San Francisco had two world premieres this summer. That both plays will be headlined fall openings in New York is not the point to be recorded here, which is, instead, the almost extravagant difference between Jean Giraudoux's Amphitryon 38… and the production with which this review is concerned: John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men presented by the San Francisco Theatre Union.

Whatever the cause—ingenuousness, curiosity, lust for contemporaneousness of scene,—one expects a great deal from a play about the living, wandering men who plant crops they never see harvested, and harvest where they have not seen the planting, in a soil which refuses them roots, men who are lonely beyond our natural heritage of loneliness. All the exciting dramatic realities are in the theme, and when the curtain goes up on Of Mice and Men the play seems authentic: characters who demand we learn all about them, situations which we feel impelled to follow through to a consummation or an intensity of non-consummation which is the same thing. A simple background of Santa Clara hills and a nonexistent river in the orchestra pit, beside which Lennie and George lie down to sleep, give promise of evoking what is inherent in the tragic saga of the itinerant agricultural worker.

But Of Mice and Men, in its present form, does not tell that saga; it does no more than block in the tantalizing outlines, with too much sentimental detail of rabbits and murders and with gaping omissions. Why? Maybe the answer to that question would also answer the “why” of the whole socially-minded theatre.