You probably barely remember Of Mice and Men from your school days—two men marching through the dusty landscape of Southern California, working as migrant laborers and trying to "raise a stake" so they can buy themselves a few acres of paradise and be humble masters of their humble domain. One of the men, George, works as the brains of the pair: exasperated, hopeful, sometimes a little mean, but fundamentally loving. The other man, Lennie, is a gentle—but exceptionally stupid—giant with nearly superhuman strength who keeps killing things accidentally. In the opening scene, he has pet a mouse to death. Later, he pets a puppy to death. And, by the novel's end (can you spoil a story this ubiquitous?), he pets a woman to death, leaving George with a horrible choice: stand back and let a mob have its brutal way with poor Lennie, or kill him quickly and painlessly as you would a trusting old dog?

Back in 1957, Canadian critic Northrop Frye classified Of Mice and Men in his "sixth phase" of literary irony, which "presents human life in terms of largely unrelieved bondage. Its settings feature prisons, madhouses, lynching mobs, and places of execution, and it differs from a pure inferno mainly in the fact that in human experience suffering has an end in death." Frye pinned Lennie as a typical "sixth phase" character, one of the "desdichado [unfortunate] figures of misery or madness, often parodies of romantic roles. Thus the romantic theme of the helpful servant giant is parodied in The Hairy Ape and Of Mice and Men, and the romantic presenter or Prospero figure is parodied in the Benjy of The Sound and the Fury."

In a 1937 interview with the New York Times, John Steinbeck described the novel (which he wrote intending to make it a play) more simply and brutally: "I was a bindlestiff myself for quite a spell. I worked in the same country that the story is laid in. The characters are composites to a certain extent. Lennie was a real person. He's in an insane asylum in California right now. I worked alongside him for many weeks. He didn't kill a girl. He killed a ranch foreman. Got sore because the boss had fired his pal and stuck a pitchfork right through his stomach. I hate to tell you how many times. I saw him do it. We couldn't stop him until it was too late."

These two ways of reading Of Mice and Men (the first archetypal, the second literal) are both infused into Seattle Repertory Theatre's current production. When the curtain first rises, the scene is almost cartoonish. The set is a yellow ridge with a droopy tree on one side and a swirly sky behind, part blue and part cloud. String instruments play a bit of bucolic tension and a voice-over narration—in a folksy, Western drawl—speaks the first words of Steinbeck's novel: "A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green..." Yep, pard'ner. Disney Does Dust Bowl.

But then George (Troy Fischnaller) and Lennie (Charles Leggett) enter, on the run from their last job in Weed, California, and deliver a powerhouse scene of brotherly intimacy. Where their setting is a little spaghetti western, their performances, directed by Jerry Manning, are strictly grounded, bold, and direct. Fischnaller rides the tension between George's love for and exasperation with his simpleminded friend. And Leggett—one of Seattle's best actors—pulls a coup by executing the dangerous role of Lennie with deep humaneness, intelligence, and grace.

The "dangerous roles" of theater are the extreme ones, the ones that fall at the far ends of the human spectrum and risk falling into caricature: the simpletons (Lennie or Charlie in Flowers for Algernon), the nihilists (Iago, Hedda Gabler), and others too immense or too weird for their worlds (Falstaff, Blanche DuBois). But Leggett's Lennie is perfectly poised. He's not a retarded clown who's beneath us, not a bombastic literary symbol of misunderstood innocence who's beyond us, and not a monstrous Freudian id. He's just a guy. A guy on a train bound for tragedy, but still just a guy hemmed in by circumstances—in this case, a doomed reach for the Western American dream. Leggett makes it look easy, but there are so many ways he could've gone wrong. In that, he has achieved a triumph.

The rest of the 10-member cast is quite good, not a weak link in it. Seanjohn Walsh struts and spits as the farm foreman with a Napoleon complex. And Teagle F. Bougere brings a whole new level of American tragedy as the farm's token black man who bitterly reads books in his private room because the white workers don't want him around for playing cards and drinking. "Books ain't no good!" he says with haunting, simmering dejection. "A guy needs somebody to be near him!"

Some of the staging and design choices are a little hokey—and include a live dog, which is always a major risk. Since an animal can't be anything other than honest—it looks directly at the audience, it can't act—it always breaks the artifice of theater and pulls focus, unless you've tranquilized the creature into near catatonia. But the performances give this old story renewed heat and light; they'll remind you why the slim novel came to be ubiquitous in the first place.