A Tenor of Survival

In the underground warren of the New York State Theater, where New York City Opera has its burrows, a pillowy, looming man in a baseball cap and a baggy T-shirt trundles into a windowless, fluorescent-lit room. It’s the sort of blank, dilapidated place that, except for the battered piano in the corner and the bits of colored tape on the floor, could be a waiting area at the Department of Motor Vehicles. But for the purposes of this rehearsal, it is a riverbank in California ranch country, during the Depression. There are no trappings to suggest that--no costumes, props or atmosphere--only raw music waiting to be made.

The scene is the ending of Carlisle Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men,” an operatic adaptation of the Steinbeck story that comes to San Diego Opera beginning Saturday. The big man is a tenor--Anthony Dean Griffey in program books, plain Tony on his birth certificate.

As he begins to sing, he slumps his linebacker shoulders, lifts the corner of a lip into a palsied grimace and metamorphoses into Lennie Small, the tender giant whose weak mind can’t control his powerful hands. Lennie’s curse is heavy-handedness--he crushes everything he loves--but Griffey touches the soft, high notes with a gentle caress. He sings with a noble desperation, and as his light, watery tenor fills the room and the words come out in neat, crisp packets, an inarticulate misfit becomes eloquent in song.

Not for an instant--whether rhapsodizing about the soft, furry creatures he plans to collect, or sitting massively on a rickety stool, twisting and kneading a rag when the music does not include him--does Griffey inch out of character. He hunches hugely and plops cross-legged on the floor like an elephantine child. He tugs and twists at his fingers, sleeves, elbow and cap; his mouth is permanently skewed into a grimace of confusion.

When the music finishes and the story, with its escalating death count--a mouse, an old hound, a puppy, a woman, a good man and a mound of useless dreams--has eked out the maximum sadness, Griffey, drenched in sweat, pads over to the side of the room. “You can’t live on a steady diet of Lennie,” he says. “It’s too draining.”

After the gripping gloominess of the scene he has just sung, Griffey’s grin comes as a shock. He seems to need to jump as quickly as possible out of the role. After each of a dozen performances of “Mice” at Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, N.Y., in the summer of 1997, weepy audience members followed Griffey back to his dressing room to find him smiling and slightly bewildered at the emotions he had unstoppered.

At a rehearsal break, the director, Rhoda Levine, a small sparkplug of a woman, fills the pause with an elaborate anecdote, reeled off at Broadway speeds. Griffey--who opened this opera season as Mitch in the much-scrutinized world premiere of Andre Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the San Francisco Opera; who reappeared on national television in the same role in December; who has sung the title role of Britten’s “Peter Grimes” at the Metropolitan Opera--murmurs: “I could never do that, stand up in front of a group of people and tell a story. I couldn’t do it.”

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Griffey grew up a fearful, taciturn boy in the furniture manufacturing center of High Point, N.C. He was living with Lennie--a whole family of Lennies, in fact--long before he had heard a note of Floyd’s music or read a word of Steinbeck. There are virtuoso actors who can molt their ordinary selves and slip into a character’s invented experiences, and there are those--such as Griffey--who anchor each role in their own lives. Or, as Levine puts it, “There are some people who have survived terrible experiences who are unable to call them back because they were so painful. And then there are others for whom those experiences stay very present, and they use them.”

Over an untouched fruit cup at a coffee shop near Lincoln Center and throughout the day, in rehearsal breaks and during a long lunch, Griffey, 31, volunteers the family history that explains how the role of Lennie permeates him so completely. As he talks, his once-raging shyness now tamed into mere reserve and unflagging Southern politeness, the baroque story he tells makes his eyes pool every once in a while, and he discreetly truncates a few events. But he does not back down from offering up for examination a life he once hid fiercely from view.

His father, he says, is a compendium of dysfunctions, a troubled man who drifted in and out of jobs in High Point’s furniture factories. “I lived with him,” Griffey says, “but I never knew whether he was having a delusional hallucination. I don’t really know much about him at all: just his name, his birth date and that he was from Virginia.” Griffey’s parents are now divorced, and he only rarely communicates with his dad.

The tenor describes his mother as a cowed, confused and skimpily educated woman who earned her paycheck wiping the oil off bedroom furniture as it slid down the assembly line. Only after her divorce 10 years ago was Griffey able to persuade her to get a high school equivalency diploma and a job in a day-care center. His only sibling was a younger brother, Mark.

By the time Tony was 6, he was the man of the house.

“I know Lennie,” he says, “but I identify more with George”--the itinerant farmhand in “Of Mice and Men” who tries to shield his helpless sidekick from the world. “I was my brother’s and my parents’ protector. I took the parental role, so I didn’t really have a childhood. If you look at photographs of me from first and second grade, you can see I was already an adult.”

It was he who fended off the social workers and kept himself and his brother out of foster care. It was he who called the furniture companies where his father had worked to plead and explain. It was he who opened the mail and locked the doors, and who wrote the utility checks when there was money to cover them.

On the outside, Griffey shuttered that reality behind an iron grate of silence and tried to participate in normality mostly by observing it. “I would watch other kids to learn how to use a knife and fork,” he recalls. “All we had in the house was four or five spoons.”

When Tony was 5, he climbed onto one of the school buses that came through town on Sunday and ferried children to church. He joined the choir of High Point’s First Baptist Church and soon attached himself quietly to the music minister, the Rev. Gerald Carter. Griffey played with the reverend’s son, took free piano lessons from his wife and practiced in his church for years. But the almost wordless Griffey kept even them in the dark about his family situation.

If Griffey is so forthcoming now, it is, he says, because he wants to evoke not pity, but a sense of hope. If he didn’t appear to be so utterly without guile, a cynic might be tempted to think that he is making the most of the publicity value of his trajectory. It’s more likely that he is reaching back to his Southern Baptist roots, with its narratives of misery and redemption, and parsing his own life for instruction.

“I speak for those who are crawling and who can’t get up,” he says fervently, as if a little of the pastoral vocation he long ago turned away from were still clinging to him. “If I can prevent even just one child from suffering the fears I had, I’ll be content.”

At curtain calls, Griffey never fails to look heavenward, as if to acknowledge the giver of his gift.

That gift was evident early on, and in that sense, at least, Griffey was lucky and his path was common, for American singers frequently come to opera from church and school choirs. He worked his way through high school singing at weddings, stared down an audience of hooting classmates to sing “The Impossible Dream” at a talent show, performed Mozart and Bach with Carter’s chorus, and assumed he would eventually become a church musician.

But if Griffey had long been forced to impersonate an adult to bind his family together, actually becoming one meant loosening the ropes, and that proved even more trying. In 1985, having graduated from high school, Griffey packed his parents and brother into their clattering car and drove them four hours to Mars Hill College in western North Carolina.

“I had this idea that parents take their kids to college,” he says. “But once we got there and had everything unloaded, I realized they had no idea how to get back. So I packed up the car and went back home with them. I attended Mars Hill College for all of four hours.”

Within a few months, though, Griffey did manage to extricate himself enough to attend a program in church music at Wingate University, a little closer to home, and he began his real vocal training and attended his first opera--a performance of Gounod’s “Faust”--in Charlotte. By the time he graduated, his church had flown him to Louisville, Ky., to visit the seminary there, but on the strength of an audition tape, he had also been accepted into the master’s program at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. Going there not only meant being 500 miles from home and veering off the route to guaranteed employment as a minister of music, but also going $35,000 into debt.

“It was a scary decision,” he says--and not, as it turned out, a particularly happy one, except that it helped to guide him to Juilliard and into the care of illustrious voice teacher Beverly Johnson, whose former students include soprano Renee Fleming. In the late summer of 1992, Griffey, quailing at the thought of failure, moved into a tiny shared room on West 57th Street, halfway between Carnegie Hall and the oily Hudson River waterfront--with its towing companies and cut-rate garages. The metaphors he uses to describe this period are gritty ones: “I knew I had the axle,” he says of working with Johnson, “and she was putting on the wheels and the inner tube.”

The 300-pound, 6-foot-4 tenor did his best to be self-effacing at Juilliard, and he smiles at the recollection of how surprised his classmates were when he won a spot in the Metropolitan Opera Young Artists Program. He attended the Tanglewood Music Center, too, where he was cast in the title role of Britten’s “Peter Grimes” in a performance conducted by Seiji Ozawa, who became an instant champion.

“I told my manager,” Ozawa says, “if I go anywhere in the world to do ‘Peter Grimes,’ I want Tony to come with me.”

In 1997, Griffey, who had appeared only in one- or two-line cameos as a Young Artist at the Met, was tapped to sing a single performance of “Grimes” there when a tenor fell ill. The title role is that of a solitary English fisherman, who, like Lennie, gets hounded to his death for an unintentional killing. He is a man full of fears and poor, simple dreams, and the director of the Met production, David Atherton, worried that Griffey might be too young and callow to play him. “He didn’t know that I knew the role well,” Griffey says. “Too well.”

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Opera careers and voices, when they are well-managed, bloom gradually, and Griffey is still a few treacherous steps away from a major international career. For one thing, there is his weight; though he is a nimble big man, he wears it regretfully and feels it is a legacy of self-doubt. It has crept back up since two years ago, when he lost 70 pounds. “This is part of what I call the mud on my wings,” he says. “Once I get rid of that, I’ll be able to take flight.”

But his tenor, which was always fresh and sweet and clear, is harnessed to an increasingly powerful technique, and it is not hard to find generally cautious voice-cultivators willing to make extravagant predictions for him. He seems unlikely to start feeling entitled. “I don’t take anything for granted,” he says. “I’m grateful just to wake up every morning with clean sheets and a nice apartment. I walk into the Met or San Francisco Opera, and I think: ‘What right do I have to be here, and to collaborate with Andre Previn, Seiji Ozawa and James Levine?’ ”

You might think that Griffey’s lack of swagger would be a handicap in the competitive world of opera, but actually it wins him friends and translates into a startling stage presence. “There is a radiance about Tony,” says New York City Opera’s general director, Paul Kellogg. “He takes command of the stage by the persuasiveness of honesty and his artistry. It may take an audience a few minutes to realize this, but it happens. He has a kind of empathy that allows him to absorb so much knowledge and feeling about human nature, which he turns outward in his remarkable gift for communicating onstage.”

Indeed, Griffey has managed to turn empathy into a form of ambition. In a world where status is often measured by the spotlight’s heat and exclusivity, Griffey has a different definition of success: “I’ll never forget when Seiji Ozawa took me to his manager and said, ‘You’ve got to sign this young man.’ I dream of the day when I can do that for somebody.”

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“Of Mice and Men,” San Diego Opera, Civic Theatre, 3rd Avenue and B Street, Saturday, 7 p.m.; Feb. 16, 7 p.m.; Feb. 19, 8 p.m.; Feb. 21, 2 p.m. $31-$112, (619) 570-1100.