Awake and Sing!

Awake and Sing! Clifford Odets' 1935 drama centers on a working-class Jewish family in the Bronx during the Great Depression. The play premiered with the Group Theatre and features characters caught between economic desperation and aspirations echoed in contemporary American culture, Broadway, and leftist politics. Its examination of family conflict, social realism, and moral choices linked Odets to figures and movements across 1930s theatrical, political, and literary circles.

Plot

The narrative unfolds in a Bronx apartment where the Bergers face eviction, unemployment, and moral dilemmas reminiscent of scenes in plays by Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. Patriarch Jacob Berger negotiates with landlords and interacts with creditors while matriarch Bessie contends with children's futures, invoking comparisons to works staged by the Group Theatre, the Federal Theatre Project, and the Provincetown Playhouse. Subplots involve romance and betrayal—Ralph's ambitions, Hennie's despair, and Myron's struggles—paralleling motifs in novels by John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and James T. Farrell. Climactic confrontations reference the era's labor disputes, New Deal policies associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, and cultural debates involving intellectuals like Walter Lippmann, John Dos Passos, and Sinclair Lewis.

Characters

Principal figures include Jacob Berger, Bessie Berger, Ralph, Hennie, Myron, and Bertha, each echoing archetypes found in plays and films starring actors such as Lee J. Cobb, Luther Adler, Stella Adler, and Elia Kazan. Supporting roles connect to theatrical practitioners like Harold Clurman, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner, and to literary contemporaries—Dorothy Parker, Edmund Wilson, and Christopher Isherwood—whose criticism contextualized character studies. The ensemble structure recalls casts from Broadway productions at the Shubert Theatre, the Music Box Theatre, and works directed by George Abbott, reflecting relationships similar to those in film adaptations by MGM, RKO, and Warner Bros.

Themes and Analysis

The play explores themes of economic hardship, generational conflict, individualism versus collectivism, and moral compromise, intersecting with debates involving the Communist Party USA, the American Labor Party, and intellectual salons frequented by Hannah Arendt, Leon Trotsky's contemporaries, and members of the Socialist Party of America. Odets' social realism draws critical lineage from naturalist writers like Émile Zola, Russian dramatists Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky, and Yiddish theater traditions centered on the Yiddish Art Theater and actors such as Jacob Adler. Musical and cinematic influences from George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Charlie Chaplin, and Frank Capra shaped interpretations, while philosophical echoes of John Dewey, William James, and Harold Bloom informed critical analysis. Psychoanalytic readings reference Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Erich Fromm; Marxist and cultural studies approaches cite Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukács, and Raymond Williams.

Production History

The original 1935 production was mounted by the Group Theatre with staging practices linked to Stanislavski's system, actors trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Actors Studio, and direction by Harold Clurman. Revivals and notable productions involved directors and actors such as Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, Dianne Wiest, Austin Pendleton, Cherry Jones, and Richard Gere in regional stagings. Companies that staged the play include the Royal National Theatre, the Goodman Theatre, the Arena Stage, the Manhattan Theatre Club, and the Lincoln Center Theater; touring ensembles performed at the Stratford Festival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Guthrie Theater. International productions appeared in London’s West End, Parisian theaters, and Israeli stages such as Habima, engaging translators and adapters who referenced cultural institutions like the New York Public Theater, the Juilliard School, and Yale Repertory Theatre.

Reception and Legacy

Critical response at the premiere linked Odets to the left-wing cultural milieu alongside figures like Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, while reviewers in The New York Times, The Nation, and The New Republic debated its politics, aesthetics, and comparisons to Broadway melodrama. The play influenced later dramatists including Arthur Miller, David Mamet, Tony Kushner, Lorraine Hansberry, and August Wilson, and informed screenwriters working within Hollywood's studio era, notably writers at Paramount, Columbia Pictures, and Universal Pictures. Academic scholarship on the play appears in journals and presses such as Modern Drama, American Quarterly, Columbia University Press, Princeton University Press, and Routledge, and continues to be studied in courses at Harvard University, Columbia University, New York University, and the University of California, Berkeley. Recordings, film adaptations, and televised stagings involved networks and institutions like PBS, BBC, and the American Film Institute, securing the play's place in twentieth-century American theatrical canon.

Category:1935 plays Category:Plays by Clifford Odets Category:American plays