The Stage in Review

“Awake and sing,” a play in three acts by Clifford Odets; produced by the Group Theatre, Inc.; directed by Harold Clurman; settings by Boris Aronson; at the Belasco Theatre.

Cast

(In order of appearance)

Myron Berger Art Smith

Bessie Berger Stella Adler

Jacob Morris Carnovsky

Hennie Berger Phoebe Brand

Ralph Berger Jules Garfield

Schlosser Roman Bohnen

Moe Axelrod Luther Adler

Uncle Morty J. E. Bromberg

Sam Feinschreiber Sanford Meisner

Without once veering from a well-worn path that has been beaten into smoothness by hundreds of playwrights before him, young Clifford Odets has managed to write a play that breathes of freshness, vitality and originality.

In “Awake and Sing!” produced by the Group Theatre at the Belasco and warmly received by a first night audience Tuesday, there are all the popular ingredients of the sex and social drama of which Broadway has seen so much since George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen started the combination on the path to acceptance in polite circles.

A young lady with a high spirit, an uncontrollable urge to escape from the tawdriness of a Bronx flat and a fine disregard for consequences, becomes pregnant. Her brother, younger, equally spirited but possessed of somewhat finer ideals, struggles manfully between the realities of a stockroom job and his vaulting aspirations.

Their mother, a “Mussolini” woman whose slavish devotion to her children is formed by ### understandable but unapprec#ted desire to see them become worldly successes, plunges them into unhappy situations with her meddling. Their grandfather, futile, embittered student of revolutionary thought, acridly pillories a social order that forces people to live out their days in sunless apartment holes.

And their uncle represents the substantial business man who scorns the economic theories of his idealist father. Then the semi-racketeer admirer of the girl, who has been soured by his experiences in the war, and a “shlemiel” son-in-law who has been trapped into marrying her to cloak her pregnancy with respectability round out the characters through whom the author develops his theme.

The ingredients are familiar. The method is familiar. The theme is old. But Odets has taken them and fashioned from them a breathing, living drama that provides an exhilarating evening in the theatre.

The dialogue is salty. The action races. There is an expert development of character and skilful building toward one climax after another.

Odets has taken the world and its age-old problems and squeezed them into a Bronx flat. His Jewish fa#ily, from the ambitious idealistic youngster to the meek little father whose horizon is a racetrack with his horse coming in with a killing, is authentic, believable. Its members quarrel, love, hate, laugh and cry in much the same fashion that your own neighbors do. Their emotions are lacerated by events that are no different from the events that are the daily portion of probably thousands of families in the Bronx, Washington Heights and the East Side.

There’s a sob and a laugh in “Awake and Sing!” and the play ends on the happy note and leaves no bitter aftertaste such as is common with most dramas of the “slice of life” variety.

What the play might have been without the highly effective acting of the Group Theatre players is a matter of conjecture. That it gains immensely from the individual interpretations of the cast goes without saying. Without exception every member imparts to his role an understanding and intelligence that makes of it a throbbing reality.

Perhaps the outstanding performance of the play is contributed by Morris Carnovsky in the role of Jacob, the grandfather with the burning desire in his heart to remold the world. Stella Adler is equally effective as Bessie Berger, the mother. Phoebe Brand as Hennie Berger, the girl who got into trouble and took an old-fashioned method to get out of it under pressure of her mother, also gives a brilliant performance. J. E. Bromberg, as Uncle Morty; Sanford Meisner as the son-in-law; Luther Adler as the wooden-legged veteran who finally wins out with Hennie; Art Smith as the father and Jules Garfield as Ralph Berger— all contribute stellar performances.

It is as easy to predict long life for this play about a Jewish family, by a Jewish author and acted by a principally Jewish cast, as it was to view it. And if Hollywood doesn’t grab it to turn into a talkie, then it will be Hollywood’s loss.

H. W.