Theater Review: Awake and Sing! by Clifford Odets on Broadway

“All of the characters in Awake and Sing! share a fundamental activity: a struggle for life amidst petty conditions.” Clifford Odets, in his introduction to Awake and Sing! (1935).

This is what stage naturalism (in the sense first advocated by Zola) does best, the depiction of human beings in the context of their larger environment, their behavior and motivations shown as the products of social forces.

I was distressed to hear Michael Riedel on his PBS TV show Theatre Talk dismiss, in passing, Lincoln Center’s mounting of Awake and Sing! as catering to “spinster theatre.” (An odd epithet for this very emotive Jewish family drama.) The remark was made while interviewing David Hare, and the larger point was theatres would rather do such “chestnuts” than more “relevant” political dramas like Stuff Happens.

Oh how soon you are forgotten, Odets, once dubbed in the NY press as “revolution’s number one boy”! For it was his conceit (and that of the adventurous Group Theatre who produced him) that representing on the Depression-era stage the plight of the Berger family from the Bronx was just as political an act as showing us the backroom dealings of Bush and Blair. The surprise in store to the Riedels out there is that Awake and Sing!—when enacted truthfully and at full-force—still grabs you by the collar more than occasionally, reminding you of the price of materialism, of an inhuman society, and, yes, even of war.

Granted, the play hasn’t been helped over the years by timid regional revivals, clueless college productions, and, frankly, the over-romanticizing by some of our elder theatre colleagues of the Group aura in general. To those jaded by such experiences, I especially commend Bartlett Sher’s freshly considered and rigorous revival, where nostalgia is replaced by a genuinely affecting melancholy of “life amidst petty conditions.” Even in its oddest and least successful choices—especially in the scenic conception—there’s not a lazy or clichéd note to the whole evening. If all our classics were produced with this much care, we would be a healthier theatre indeed.

The production also reminds us that Odets wrote for some of the greatest stage actors this country has ever known (i.e. the Group Company) and that nothing wipes away the taint of “datedness” from his scripts like good acting. His powerfully loony locutions (part Yiddish, part gangster) sound dated only in the mouths of lackluster actors. Sher’s casting makes all the “dif” here, as Odets says. Especially in the two runaway roles, the sensitive tough guy—and WWI amputee WWI—Moe Axelrod (Mark Ruffalo) and the domineering warden of a mama, Bessie (Zoe Wanamaker).

Lest any doubt Ruffalo has been spoiled by Hollywood, here is a reminder of what first captivated audiences and critics about him in Kenneth Lonnergan’s early stage work. (Lonnergan, of course, being one of many American dramatists bearing the Odetsian influence in his love of the poetry of the New York streets.) Ruffalo handles Odets’ language effortlessly (dare I say “naturalistically”) fully internalizing its big emotions. I say “internalizing” because this is a surprisingly quiet performance, not scene-stealing bravura. But his intensity and truthfulness is always highly tangible. The result is a very warm Moe, a romantic, not just a “heel.”

Article Author: Playgoer

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