Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

What should we make of Of Mice and Men? It is easily the most attractive of John Steinbeck’s major works, and, like the themes of Wagner’s operas or the energetic conducting style of Leopold Stokowski, Steinbeck’s bindlestiffs are known to millions of post-literate Americans through Bugs Bunny cartoons. I don’t make that point facetiously; a work of art, or a literary character, has to touch the culture at a very deep level for popular parody to be possible. There is something about Steinbeck’s odd couple, George Milton and Lennie Small, beyond the obvious pathos, that is still arresting for us. Perhaps it is because there are so few writers in our own time who have bothered to take the issue of friendship seriously. Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, Jim and Huck, Lennie and George: Tales of philia for an empire of eros. Even the BBC’s reimagining of the Holmes–Watson friendship in the Benedict Cumberbatch series felt obliged to insert a number of gay gags, the not-entirely-unreasonable assumption being that in the twenty-first century two men as close as Holmes and Watson would be perceived as a sexual pairing.

There’s a bit of that, but not too much, in the largely unadorned version of Of Mice and Mencurrently being staged on Broadway under the direction of Anna Shapiro, with James Franco in the role of George and Chris O’Dowd as Lennie. There’s some question about whether