Time has turned some of the characters in Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing into Jewish-family-play cliches. There’s Bessie, the interfering, smothering matriarch; Myron, the nebbishy failure of a father; Jacob, the burnt-out radical grandfather; and Ralph, the rebellious representative of the next generation. It must be remembered, though, that the play was first produced in 1935, when such characters weren’t all that familiar (except when already encountered in the Yiddish theater).
Now Odyssey Theater Ensemble has revived its production of Awake and Sing, one that it first mounted twenty years ago, with the same director and many of its original actors returning to take up where they had left off (after a sold-out, nine-month run). There is nothing dated about the play’s theme, though—the struggle for life amidst petty conditions. Neither can we dismiss the play’s other main concerns, notably the price America pays for its obsession with success, which the playwright once called “the peritonitis of the soul.” Odets himself fell victim to that sickness when, in 1952, he appeared in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee and ratted out several of his leftist friends in the Group Theater, “naming names” to escape the Hollywood blacklist. That sad history aside, it’s still good to see Awake and Sing again. The play’s vivid language, dramatic power and fighting spirit come through strongly in this revival, its Jewish humor, as well. Here’s a brief sample, taken from a dinner-table exchange between Jacob and Bessie. Jacob (ironically): “If it rained pearls, who would work?” Director Elina de Santos and her excellent cast have combined to bring Odets’s masterpiece to life. Working on a somewhat cramped set (of a lower-middle-class apartment in the Bronx), the actors make you believe you’re back in the middle of the Depression, when jobs were scarce—“without a dollar, you don’t look life in the eye”—and opportunities were limited. Awake and Sing is a politically conscious drama, very much distressed by what capitalism’s failure was doing to the USA in the 30s, but at its heart is this optimistic quote from Isaiah: “Your dead shall live; your dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, you that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead.”
Bessie: “Another county heard from.”
