Theater Review: Awake and Sing! by Clifford Odets on Broadway - Page 4

[For some great visual images of the set — and explanatory commentary by Sher — see the fun “Audio Slide Show” on the NYTimes.com theatre page. ]

The abstractness of the design leads to another deficiency: the downplaying of period. This is not a production outwardly concerned with the thirties. I’m sure leather jackets were around then, for instance, but isn’t Moe’s here a trite extravagant? (Or is it just a way to remind the younger audiences that Mark Ruffalo is cool!) The sparse set also seems deliberately “timeless” and uninformed by the world around it. (The walls are practically bare. Which may be why it doesn’t seem to evoke a specifically Jewish family home either.)

Then again, such historical boxing in and adherence to pictorial realism has led to the kind of nostalgia that has long cursed this play. By foregrounding the acting and the emotional worlds going on within the characters, Sher wisely reminds us what is still fresh about it. Besides, the minutiae of the thirties are always present in Odets’ dialogue itself, impeccably spoken by this cast.

Small caveats? The play doesn’t need to be three acts anymore; there’s a perfectly fine break between the two scenes of Act Two, which I’m surprised Sher did not take. Our theatergoing culture just does not seem to have the patience to sustain energy through two intermissions - especially when the second curtain comes down on a crushing fatality, not a kickline of showgirls.

Also — getting textual — the word “nigger” is used twice in the play, both times in the sense of being worked to death “like a nigger.” Sher ironically cuts it from a speech of Bessie’s (the bad guy of the play) and retains it when our heroine Hennie says it. If any amending is to be made, it would make sense to do the opposite, no? Unless Sher’s goal is to avoid harshening the villain and to complicate the hero. (The challenge of what to do with this word in revivals of '20s and '30s classics in general plagues directors constantly, of course.)

As for Odets the Political Playwright… Those new to him might be surprised by a seeming innocuousness. (Especially in this largely apolitical production.) But it’s there. Not just in the obvious, admittedly forced “happy ending” of Ralph’s salvation in the cause of union activism. (A trace of the play’s storied revisions.) But when Odets assembles the family before supper, and the capitalist uncle, the war vet, and the “old country” socialist all go at it, the turbulent outside world makes its unmistakable entrance.

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