Relief on a Lonely Journey

When I speak to tenor Demetrious Sampson, Jr. and bass-baritone Sam Dhobhany, they’ve both recently come off of a nine-performance run of Porgy and Bess at Houston Grand Opera. Sampson, who played the drug dealer Sportin’ Life, and Dhobhany, who played the Undertaker, are young artists in the Sarah and Ernest Butler Houston Grand Opera Studio. The Butler Studio offers Sampson and Dhobhany opportunities to perform in mainstage productions like Porgy alongside the stars of the industry.

But this season’s production of Of Mice and Men—composed by Carlisle Floyd, co-founder of the Studio—is on a whole different level for the two young artists. “It will be the biggest thing that I will have done in my career,” admits Sampson, who plays Lennie. “Most definitely,” adds Dhobhany, who plays George. “This is my first time doing a role where I feel like I have to carry an evening.” As the protagonists of Floyd’s 1970 opera, they appear in every scene of the nearly two-hour show—a work that places great technical demands on singers.

But they won’t be alone in this endeavor. Just as their characters George and Lennie find mutual support in one another, Sampson and Dhobhany are backed by a community of coaches and mentors in the Butler Studio, not to mention their fellow young artists who will take the stage with them. Ahead of Of Mice and Men, Sampson and Dhobhany met to discuss their characters’ search for companionship in a lonely world, as well as the family these two rising stars have found at HGO.

Opera Cues: How does the Butler Studio help prepare you for this huge undertaking?

Sam Dhobhany: We’ve got a really helpful music staff. They’re open to hearing us at any time. And they’re always willing to meet us where we’re at—whether it’s just speaking over the text or plunking out notes. I’ve also been enjoying the acting sessions with the Alley Theatre.

Demetrious Sampson, Jr.: I have to agree—we have coaches who are willing to push us, and who know how to get us there, too. Also, Colin Michael Brush, the director of the Studio, has been very intentional about who we work with to build our acting capabilities. I think what I’ve been learning so well in the Studio is how to concentrate a character and really make the edges of that character neat.

OC: How have you started to flesh out your characters?

SD: I’ve thought about George for quite some time. He takes on that role of this older brother to Lennie, this fatherly sort of figure. He’s an honest man just trying to get out of what he calls a “stingy life.” And he wants the best for Lennie and him. He would go to the end of the earth to be able to achieve that dream for them and to call a place their home.

George is searching for solitude, he’s searching for peace—all the things in his life that he probably didn’t grow up with. He has a negative outlook on life. But I think he’s so close to Lennie because he’s all the things that George wants to be. He yearns for this peace that Lennie gets from soft things, from animals. So I think that’s why he likes spending time—he likes the way he feels when he’s around Lennie.

DSJ: Everybody else has these worries in the world, and the only thing Lennie’s worried about is being a good person, living with George on their own land, and soft things. Every time Lennie talks about something soft, and every time he talks about how he’s not going to do nothing bad, it really chokes me up. Like when he sings this aria, “It was something I could pet,” we finally get respite from the incessant atonality in the opening of Act I.

You see this man with the hope of a child and how it makes things lighter for him. Perhaps, if we had the hope of children, how much lighter could things be for us? That doesn’t mean we have to intellectualize things like a child. But what if we carried hope or light in us like a child?

OC: Demetrious, how do you approach portraying an intellectually disabled character like Lennie?

DSJ: A lot of research. I don’t want to make a caricature of anyone. So I’ve gone on the websites of the National Center for Learning Disabilities, The Arc of the United States, and SPEDTex to do research on what it means to be mentally disabled, autistic, or neurodivergent. But also, I’m really looking for what disabled people desire when it comes to seeing themselves portrayed in media by people who are not of their community. I do want to at least shine a light—and a nuanced light—on disabilities at large. So it’ll be a lot of research, a lot of conversations, a lot of praying, and just internalizing.

OC: This opera also poses some daunting musical challenges—it’s not an easy piece to sing.

SD: At first glance, it can look like rocket science. I mean, it’s definitely harmonically and rhythmically complex. There are all these changing meters that Floyd has in the score. But I think after enough repetition and coaching, it strangely makes sense. Floyd is the pioneer of American opera, and you can really hear that—not only musically, but textually as well. And, of course, he wrote the libretto himself.

DSJ: I think the setting of the text is organic to our American speech patterns. My family is from West Georgia—in the trees, chile. And being Southern, we have that quintessential American speech meter. So I think that the text-setting feels very intuitive. It works into a groove, you know?

OC: What are some scenes in Of Mice and Men that stand out to you?

SD: I find the finale to Act I so powerful and almost spooky. They shoot Candy’s dog, and everyone just treats it like it’s nothing. Then the Ballad Singer comes and sings, “I’m moving on. Got no home, address unknown.” And it’s the truth—this is what they’re used to.

DSJ: But also, if they can kill my dog, how much longer is it going to take when I’m no good and they kill me? And I think that is kind of the theme: When loneliness comes around, you lose compassion, and you lose your sense of humanity.

The point that always sticks out to me is when Lennie has just broken Curley’s hand, and the ranch hands are like, “We won’t tell how your hand got broken if you don’t fire him.” They have not known this man for that long, and they’re already sticking up for him. I just wish that we did that more now. You don’t see it enough in real life—sticking up for the person you don’t know because the person on top of them is oppressing them so harshly.

OC: As singers, you have to lead itinerant lives as you travel from gig to gig. Do you find yourself relating to the loneliness of wandering ranch hands?

DSJ: This year, I lost two people that I called my chosen family. They didn’t die—I’m just no longer close with them. When I was traveling on contracts, these were the people I could depend on to call. And so to lose two of them—it broke my heart. But it forced me to create community elsewhere. And I think that’s so important, especially in this industry.

SD: I mean, it’s like the saying: “As singers, we’re paid to be away from our family.” So I can say that I can relate on one level. At the same time, we’re not working at ranches. When we’re dealing with loneliness, we’re at least doing what we love to do: singing. So we have some sort of relief on our lonely road.

OC: And it sounds like you have a family of colleagues to come home to in the Butler Studio.

DSJ: I remember in the beginning of the season, we were hanging out almost every weekend. We know each other, and we know our strengths and weaknesses, so we’ll be able to push each other and also help each other when we fall.

SD: We just all get along really well. I think that adds chemistry onstage. It’s really nice to be singing with the Studio in a production, because it’s been a while since they’ve done a Studio production. And I think it’s quite full circle that it’s Of Mice and Men, because Carlisle Floyd helped to launch the Studio.

OC: Why do you think Of Mice and Men remains relevant today?

DSJ: I think it will do well for Houston to have a piece like this that shows the condition of people who work in our agricultural sector, especially immigrants—undocumented and documented alike. And I think our production will show, especially in our cast, how different these people can look. We have two Asian workers on this ranch, two Black people, two white men, and then a man from the nation of Georgia.

So I think it’s important to show, not only the diversity of what it could look like to work in agriculture, but the parallels of the conditions in the 1930s and the conditions now. Also, how they stuck together and how human they were. I mean, these are all such human things.