Life at the Boiling Point

Tolstoy said that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Theatrically, unhappy families do have something in common: they are the breeding grounds of durably vital plays and of great playwrights. From the Greek tragedies through Ibsen and Chekhov, the unhappy family recurs as a dominating theme. Similarly, it is almost a catalogue of the best American plays. Think of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This says something about the nature of drama, which thrives on intensity and stripped-to-the-soul confrontations--life at the boiling point. The family provides just that. It contains naked love, naked hate, naked domination and naked humiliation interacting in a space that is as limited and sometimes more claustrophobic than the stage.

This is the genre to which the late Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing belongs. Add it to the surprisingly springy revivals of the current season. The natural assumption was that Odets' play would be as antiquated as its date, 1935. Instead, it is a salutary reminder that real characters in recognizably human situations date only as people do, in particulars but not in essentials.

The dominating figure in the play is Bessie Berger (Joan Lorring), an abrasively dislikable Momma Portnoy. Her ineffectual husband Myron (Salem Ludwig) sums up a lifetime of quiet desperation when he tells his son, "Don't think life's easy with Momma." Like many another line in the play, it lingers in the air with Chekhovian sadness, like a note struck on an unseen piano. Even though Myron is U.S.-born, he is a prototype of the immigrant father who was held in contempt if he failed economically, and derided as a philistine if he succeeded, often by the son whom he had slaved to educate and thereby ended by alienating.

No one conveys better than Odets the poignancy of a man who finds that the center of power in his own home is his wife, whose biological authority as a mother cannot be abrogated. One is aware in Awake and Sing of the wolf outside the door, the Great Depression, but one is moved by all the gnawed bones of hope, fear and desire that lie piled up within.

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