IN 1935, the same year that Clifford Odet's Awake and Sing! was first produced in New York, the author said he wrote the play because, "I was sore at my whole life." Odets, perhaps the foremost American leftist playwright of the thirties, blends this rebellious anger masterfully with his social concerns in the tragicomedy of a family struggling "for life amidst petty conditions" during the hard times of the Depression.
The Harvard Summer School Repertory Theater's lively, straight-forward production, mounted in an excellent and unobtrusive set and supplied with equally good properties and costumes, makes poignant again the hardship of that era. Delivering Odet's studied commonplace speech with all the humor it deserves and the sense of tragedy that ultimately underlies it, the production imparts the old-fashioned feeling of uplift the play was undoubtedly meant to convey.
A family drama. Awake and Sing! tells the almost deceptively simple story of Bessie Bogo, a lower middle class Jewish mother striving to propel her two children to economic success during a time when even survival is difficult. Her pretentions to respectability lead her to engineer a loveless marriage between her pregnant daughter and a hapless recent immigrant. Her relentless drive for upward mobility causes her to heartlessly disapprove of her son's love for a peniless orphan. Their struggles are played out with an important group of other stereotypical characters all used artfully by Odets. The grandfather Jacob counters Bessie's values with his untutored, untested, but deeply felt radicalism. Despite his own failure to act, he hopes to inspire his grandson Ralph to build a new world rather than achieve his individual desire for advancement and money. On the other side, Morty embodies his sister Bessie's values as the self-satisfied capitalist who pats his overfull belly draped in his fancy trousers as he complains, "Every Jew and Wop in the shop eats my bread and behind my back says, 'a sonofabitch.'" To complete the group there is the gentle failure of a father who lives in the past, and the small-time gangster with a heart of gold who can't express his more tender feelings and who is no more a crook than any capitalist is.
Director John D. Shearin has applied a light but firm touch to his enterprise and his talented company, avoiding overdoing a script easily overdone and providing a fluent, entertaining piece of theater. The fast and funny domestic dialogue, like the banter in any household, conveys surprisingly complex meaning and tension through its trivial irrelevance and presents a challenge of interpretation which the production meets. Dealing with an obvious though not unambiguous "message play," the Loeb group meets the problem of getting the message across without hammering it in. Odets-a short-term Communist Party member who quit because of the party's doctrinaire artistic strictures-may have been, as he later said, a naive radical. But the play's point is, if simple, nonetheless vibrant and valid for the historical moment which inspired it and for today. As Odets told the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, it wasn't Communism that made him hate poverty.
Originally written for a repertory company, the Group Theater, the play showcases fully seven principal characters, all crucial to its tightly woven underlying themes. With professional case and engaging vigour, the accomplished cast brings life to every member of this large group of stock figures with their funny and sad cliche-laden speech. Taking the role of the ineffectual old radical whose one positive act is a negative sacrifice, Morris Carnovsky strikes just the perfect understated note of pathos as Jacob, the part he played almost forty years ago in the original Group Theater production. As the domineering Jewish mother with implacable bourgeois aspirations, Carol Gustafson succeeds as the dislikable antagonist Bessie Berger with a tongue and manner as commanding as any lower-middle class Jewish mother struggling for the good life in America. Though Gustafson kibitzes a bit too much her performance lets us see, as Ralph comes to see, that life made Bessie the way she is.
HENNIE BERGER, the tough-talking daughter who complies with her mother's scheme to falsely entrap a husband and yet managers to endure, is sympathetically portrayed by Helena Ruoti, who delivers her smart remarks with all the emotion that simmers beneath them. As the wisecracking racketeer who understands that it's all a racket. "Marriage, politics, big business- everybody plays cops and robbers," and who says "Listen, lousy," when he means "I love you," Steven Gilborn's Moe Axelrod grows on you throughout the production. Donald Buka polishes off the role of the fat cat capitalist Uncle Morty as effortlessly as he wolfs down the huge dinner with which Bessie woos him.
Gary Silow faces one of the most difficult roles, the young innocent tortured by ambitions created for him by his mother and his society, ambitions frustrated by the Depression, and he faces it with the least amount of experience. But he carries off the part of Ralph with enough expertise to make heartbeats flutter when he proclaims his new resolve: "Maybe we'll fix it so life won't be printed on dollar bills."
In the fifties and sixties the sated Jews of "Goodbye Columbus," the children of men like Uncle Morty, are free from even the knowledge of economic hardship to experience a new kind of disillusionment practically unimaginable to their progenitors, disillusionment with the shallowness of life printed on a great big safe stack of dollar bills. Perhaps today as a different kind of economic squeeze threatens the comfortable life that endangered stack provides, one can sense again the conflict of Awake and Sing!, the conflict between ambition for security within the system and the risks of social change. If it is true as the magazines tell us that students today worry about and struggle only for security careers in what they perceive as a frightening economic environment, we can be inspired by the admirable Loeb portrayal of Ralph Berger's tentative growth and determination during the bottom of the Depression, "Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust," Jacob quotes Isaiah, "and the earth shall cast out the dead."
