Awake and Sing

Written by Clifford Odets

Directed by Ben Levit

At the Huntington Theatre Company

OPPOSITES, apparently, do not actually attract. If they did, then the American Repertory Theatre and the Huntington Theatre Company would tear loose from their foundations, hurtle into the air, and smash into each other somewhere over Allston.

The Huntington, located just around the corner from Symphony Hall, is the natural rival for the A.R.T: it is the professional theater in residence at Boston University and the only other repertory theater in the Boston area with the resources to compete in the cultural arena. Founded just two years after the A.R.T. moved into town, the Huntington offers productions in which the writer takes top billing and the director is just another guy on the program.

No avant-garde operas, 40-foot high Lincolns and inexplicable rhinoceri--and no reviews in Newsweek either--but theater Like It Oughta Be. To underline the point, two of the playwrights that Robert Brustein named to Time Magazine as representing "the kind of theater we're not interested in"--Shaw and Stoppard--are featured in the current season at the Huntington.

Another playwright Brustein would not touch with a 20-foot curtain rod is Clifford Odets, author of the Huntington's latest offering, Awake and Sing. Odets was one of the most prominent American playwrights of the 1930s, working with the Group Theater, the idealistic, left-wing venture that helped bring the modern theater to the United States. Odets first hit the big time with his Socialist one-act, Waiting for Lefty, which supposedly had audiences on their feet, yelling "Strike! Strike!"

Awake and Sing, his first full-length play, is a leftist, Jewish melodrama, something that Chekhov would have written if he had grown up in the Bronx and been named Blumberg. It treads on ground that we seen many times before: the Berger apartment on the Grand Concourse looks just like Neil Simon's place in Brighton Beach, Woody Allen's old home under the roller coaster at Coney Island, and even Alexander Portnoy's house of horrors in Newark. But this is not nostalgia; the fuzzy sentimentalism of memory is replaced here with a genuine anger, and even a trace of contempt.

Bessie Berger rules the roost through a combination of intimidation and expertly applied guilt. "Someday you'll remember how you sucked away a mother's life!" she cries at her frustrated and repressed son, Ralph, still at home at 22 and still stuck working in rich Uncle Morty's garment warehouse. Ralph's father, Myron, is an ineffectual nebbish; his sister Hennie a nasty, frustrated romantic; and his grandfather, old Jake, an unreconstructed Bolshie from the days of the Wobblies.

ALSO IN THE HOUSE is Moe Axelrod, the boarder, a small time drifter laden with a heart of coal. His leg was shot off in the Great War, and he is as bitter as we expect him to be: he clumps about the apartment in his double-breasted pinstripe suit and porkpie hat, spouting off a ridiculous agglomeration of cynical street idiom: "You ain't sunburned. You hoid me."

But Moe, nasty as he is, has tender spots available for Hennie, as frustrated by a "necessary" marriage as he is by his whole life, and for old Jake, who, defeated and cast aside, still manages to impart some of his idealism to Ralph. With all this going on, the play is stately in pace, complex in structure, with all sorts of subplots and developments over three long acts. As Yiddische Chekhov, it dwells on the domineering mother, the sniveling new wealth, and the slow death of the beautiful and the valuable under the crushing weight of modern avarice. Naturally, it's also about as subtle as a flying mallet: when someone flashes a life insurance policy, for example, it's the symbolic equivalent of a large black raven alighting on his head.

This is not to say that it is entirely lacking in the "lyrical realism" that the Huntington insists on in their advertisements. Ralph, trying to describe the wonders of the girl he has fallen in love with: "She's so beautiful, she's like...French words!" And the complete subjugation of vitality in this house, under the materialistic hand of Bessie, is so carefully and completely drawn that when the moment of redemption comes for Ralph, not even the dated political sensibility can dampen the moment.

The performance is to regional theater standards, ranging from fair to good. The Huntington's style puts quite a bit of weight on the actor's shoulders, and generally they dig into their melodramatic motivations with not a trace of self-consciousness. Particularly good is Gary Sloan, who keeps the part of Moe Axelrod from sliding into a hysterical morass of cliche and mannerism. How he can deliver lines to the woman he's in love with like "I wrote my name on you. I'm indelible ink" with a straight face is beyond me, but he does it.

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the tally, however, is Lydia Bruce's key performance as Bessie. Her Machiavellian machinations to keep her family in line seem to have no motivation other than sheer perfidy, and when she does try to explain herself all she does is whine. One problem right off the bat is the Jewish dialect which seems like an alien tongue to most of the actors, as they try to wrap their mouths around convoluted phrases like "So bad I never imagined you could be!" One small complaint, only for purists, is that there is not one single Yiddish word uttered in the course of the play. Come on, Clifford, that's where all those weird constructions come from. What are these people, goyim?

Despite the limitations of this particular production, it is a pleasure to break free of the Brustein-dominated Cambridge theater scene and see how the other half emotes. Realism in drama and an emphasis on the text is not dead, as the Huntington continually proves. Awake and Sing is a play about finding hope in a world crushed under the weight of materialism and selfishness. Whether or not the play makes its case, the fact that it is being done in Boston--and done so faithfully, too--is no small cause for rejoicing.