‘Men’ Very Good but Not Very Nice

“Of Mice and Men,” John Steinbeck said in 1936, as he was writing it, “is neither a novel nor a play but it is a kind of playable novel.” Chapters are scenes, each begun with a description of setting and the narrative progresses principally through dialogue. It took little effort for playable novel to move quickly to Broadway hit in 1937 and then to celebrated film in 1939, with outstanding music by Aaron Copland that acutely captures Steinbeck’s spare mood and his lonely characters with their compelling dreams.

The road to opera, however, was rockier. Carlisle Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men,” which the San Diego Opera staged Saturday night at the Civic Theatre, was finished in 1970 after considerable struggle. The composer has said in interviews that he had to write the opera twice, the second time replacing Steinbeck’s words with his own, singable ones, although remaining close to the structure of the play.

Floyd is a curious case in modern opera. An American of old- fashioned verismo melodramas that reflect his Southern heritage, his operas have been produced hundreds of times. But his sentimental music and predictable dramatic situations have had to fight for respect. Now with new opera audiences and a vogue for accessibility, they are getting it. This spring the Metropolitan Opera will stage his most famous opera, “Susannah,” for Renee Fleming.

San Diego’s production of “Of Mice and Men” comes from New York City Opera, and there are several other productions of it this season around the country.

Saturday’s performance was very good, and Anthony Dean Griffey, celebrated for his Lennie in New York, proved a powerful singer and actor. The 72-year-old composer received a standing ovation when he took a curtain call.

Clearly there is something here to which audiences in the late 20th century respond. Perhaps mine, then, is a minority view in finding this opera hateful, but I think it is also a Californian view.

It is not the music, per se, that is the problem. The score is polished, theatrically specific, organically developed, readily suited for voices and words and as easy to comprehend as a conventional film soundtrack. Floyd has, in fact, made a genuine opera out of “Of Mice and Men,” not just set play to music. But he has made a manipulative, mean-spirited one.

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Steinbeck’s novel avoids sentimentality and melodrama by presenting characters too buffeted by events around them to be able to reach out and touch each other. They try to connect and they always just miss. Good and evil are abstractions hard for them to apply to the real world. A certain quiet nobility is their best hope. And Steinbeck’s prose is like the emotionally restrained 1930s California music, say that of his friend at the time John Cage.

Floyd’s characters are self-absorbed, explosive, rotten. He is never very nice to women in his operas, and especially not to Curley’s wife, whose presence creates such havoc around the world of migrant workers. Steinbeck saw her as neither victim nor harlot, but rather a sympathetic creature of fate. Floyd turns her into Salome. Steinbeck says less rather than more about Lennie, who is clueless but not crazy. Floyd says more, giving us a Lennie on a short, scary fuse--practically a serial killer who moves from mouse to pup to girl.

The production by Rhoda Levine has no fresh ideas (none would be appropriate in this opera), but it does have energy and focus. Griffey’s Lennie can seem occasionally more a “Marat/Sade” inmate than guileless big kid, but his is an admirable performance just the same. He has presence and a tenor that is pure, sweet and clarion. Erich Parce (George), Diane Alexander (Curley’s Wife), Joel Sorensen (Curley), Stephen Powell (Slim) and Kenneth Cox (Candy) all demonstrated precisely the same virtues. They looked their respective parts, they sang with a sense of surety, and they made every word mean something. Karen Keltner conducted with dramatic intensity.

John Conklin places each scene with careful specificity--barn, bunkhouse or field with machine scraps and oil barrels. More atmospheric lighting, though, is wanted as are less intrusive supertitles. None, with this cast and composer, are even necessary.

* “Of Mice and Men,” Civic Theatre, 202 C. St., San Diego. Repeats Tuesday at 7 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. $31-$93. (619) 570-1100.