A Melodrama of Failed Promise

By Stefan Kanfer

AWAKE AND SING! by Clifford Odets

"A low dishonest decade" was the way W.H. Auden viewed the '30s; he was thinking of politics. Clifford Odets saw those years as a time when "every house was lousy with lies and hate"; he was thinking of the middle class. From the vantage point of a half-century, that appears to be all he ever thought about. It is not the most flattering way to remember the man who was once the lodestar of the Old Left. But then neither is the revival of his melodrama Awake and Sing!

When it was first staged in 1935, the play exploded in the faces of complacent audiences who regarded the theater as a means of escape from the Depression. Odets overturned every theatrical bromide. In the crucible of the Berger apartment, Bessie the mother is a tyrannical presence; Myron the father is an ineffectual bumbler. Their heroine daughter Hennie becomes pregnant, foists her child off on an unsuspecting immigrant husband, then runs off with a small-time racketeer. The grandfather spouts Marxist shibboleths ("Abolish private property"). The youngest Berger, Ralph, obviously a mouthpiece for the author, yearns to break free from the suffocating love of his parents.

Awake and Sing! was immeasurably aided by the personnel of the new Group Theater, and by its star, a youth named John Garfield, who ignited the stage when he stepped upon it. But even they could not disguise the strident, metallic lyricism ("Say the word--I'll tango on a dime"). Nor can the current cast hide the muddled thoughts of the author, who felt that "new artworks should shoot bullets" but who filled the theater with smoke.

Although Odets was 28 when he wrote Awake and Sing!, he could grant only his older characters credibility. As Bessie, Nancy Marchand has a despairing authority, and as her brother Morty, Michael Lombard combines unctuous self-regard and bone-deep insecurity. As the old, unrepentant radical Jacob, Paul Sparer provides a sense of guttering energy that is supposed to illuminate the hopes of the young. It does nothing of the kind. Brother and sister, husband and lover all perform in a declamatory style more appropriate to pageants than to plays. Moreover, Theodore Mann's direction takes the Bergers' zoo story and makes it sprawl inappropriately on the Circle in the Square's arena stage. Seen in the round, Odets is cruelly exposed; phrases that once seemed freshly coined on the streets of New York now appear to have been copied from bumper stickers ("Life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills").

Awake and Sing! is essentially a story of failed promise. But none was so glaring as the playwright's. Clifford Odets was one of the most applauded writers of his generation; he ended in Hollywood writing unproduced scripts, repudiating his old colleagues and furnishing names to the House Un-American Activities Committee when it came to investigate the film industry. As evidence of his political rightness, Odets showed the Congressmen a pan of Awake and Sing! in the New Masses: "A situation is created out of nothing just to get across a wisecrack." That is not an entirely unfair appraisal. Odets' single authentic tragedy was the one that occurred offstage. --By Stefan Kanfer