SYNOPSIS OF SCENES
Time: The late 1930s.
Place: An agricultural valley in Northern California.
Scene 1: A sandy bank of the Salinas River.  Thursday night.
Scene 2: The interior of a bunkhouse.  Late Friday morning.
Scene 3: The interior of the same bunkhouse.  About seven-thirty Friday evening.
 
Scene 4: The room of the stable buck, a lean-to.  Ten o’clock Saturday evening.
Scene 5: One end of a great barn.  Mid-afternoon, Sunday.
Scene 6: The sandy bank of the Salinas River.  Sunday night.

Director's Notes
While accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, John Steinbeck said “the ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.

Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit--for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectability of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”

His selection for the Nobel Prize was controversial, many critics didn’t consider him “great” enough, he was dismissed as a “popular” author.  But the burning passion with which Steinbeck wrote is what made him great, and is why he won the Nobel Prize. The story of Lennie and George burns with Steinbeck’s righteousness. The moral outrage expressed in his best novels, especially those written in the 1930s, helped change the country. 

For a play first presented in late 1937, Of Mice and Men is remarkably up to date. Steinbeck’s characters are almost all isolated. They struggle with this isolation and that activity forms one of the main conflicts of the story. The characters are alone for a wide variety of reasons – Lennie because of his size and lack of mental acuity; Candy because he is crippled; Crooks because of racial intolerance; Curley’s Wife because she is the only woman; and so on. They are united only in their isolation and so are unable to fulfill their dreams, or better their lot. Frank Rich, in his review of the Broadway production of The Grapes of Wrath, said that Steinbeck believes in “the importance of community, the existence of an indigenous American spirit that resides in inarticulate ordinary people, the spiritual resonance of American music, and the heroism of the righteous outlaw.” The seemingly simple story unfolds on many levels and will, hopefully, make us renew our membership in the human race. 

- Malcolm Ewen