Awake and Sing! (play)
"Awake and Sing!" is a three-act play by Clifford Odets that premiered in 1935, following the success of his earlier work, "Waiting for Lefty." Although it was written before "Waiting for Lefty," it was marketed as a follow-up and is often noted for its rich character development and dialogue. The play is set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and primarily depicts the struggles of a Jewish family in the Bronx. Key characters include Bessie, the controlling mother focused on respectability; Jacob, the socialist grandfather; and Ralph, Bessie's son who expresses disillusionment with a money-driven life.
The play blends themes of family dynamics and the American Dream, exploring the tensions between love and rebellion within familial relationships. Critics have praised its portrayal of lower-middle-class Jewish life and its complex emotional landscape, which includes both pessimism about economic struggles and a cautious optimism in its resolution. "Awake and Sing!" is considered significant for its influence on later American writers, reflecting broader immigrant and minority experiences, and it remains a poignant examination of family, identity, and aspiration during challenging times.
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Awake and Sing! (play)
Identification Play about tensions in a Jewish family during the Depression
Author Clifford Odets
Date First produced February 19, 1935
One of six plays by Clifford Odets that catapulted him to fame in the last half of the 1930’s and made his name synonymous with radicalism and social protest. The play was later seen as a sensitive study of family dynamics and the immigrant experience rather than as a serious call to revolution.
Early in 1935, after the success of Odets’s first produced play, Waiting for Lefty (1935), the Group Theatre mounted the first production of Awake and Sing!, advertising it as a new play by the author of Waiting for Lefty. However, Awake and Sing! was written before Waiting for Lefty. Moreover, whereas Waiting for Lefty, a one-act play about a taxi strike, was primarily a propaganda vehicle, Awake and Sing! was a full-length, three-act play that at the time was compared by some commentators to the works of the nineteenth century Russian playwright Anton Chekhov.
Odets had begun writing Awake and Sing! (then called I Got the Blues) in 1932, but the directors of the Group Theatre, a troupe with which Odets had been associated since 1931, at first declined to produce it, finding it too pessimistic and too narrowly Jewish. The play was performed in part at a summer camp, but the theater’s directors encouraged Odets to revise the play, which he did, introducing the optimism that characterizes the ending of the play. He also modified the character of Bessie, the mother, to make her less harsh, and removed most of the Yiddish expressions that were found in the original version. However, the play remains a depiction of the Jewish milieu during the Depression. The pessimism of the original version remains in the revised one, mixing uneasily with the closing optimism, which for some commentators does not fit with the rest of the play.
Odets produced an ensemble piece in which several characters have important roles: Bessie, the domineering Jewish mother who will not let her son marry a poor orphan and who is obsessed with respectability; Jacob, her father, an old socialist who talks about revolution and listens to records of Enrico Caruso; Myron, Bessie’s ineffectual husband, who talks about how things were better in the past when Theodore Roosevelt was president; Uncle Morty, who has become a successful dress manufacturer; and Ralph, Bessie and Myron’s son, who wishes life did not have to depend on money. There is also the strange couple of Moe Axelrod, the one-legged bookie who pursues Ralph’s sister, Hennie, and Hennie herself, who complains about being forced by Bessie into a loveless marriage so that she can have a father for her illegitimate child.
Commentators have praised the play for its use of dialogue; its conjuring of the lower-middle-class milieu of the Jewish community of the Bronx, New York; and its exploration of the tensions among the various family members, especially between Bessie and her children and between Bessie and Jacob. Some commentators suggest that the play depicts a mixture of love and hate toward the institution of the family; it is a lovingly created portrayal of a family that also includes rebellion against the very nature of family, as in Hennie’s decision to run away with Moe, leaving her baby and husband behind, and in Jacob’s quotation from Karl Marx to the effect that such families should be abolished.
The play is also seen as an examination of the American Dream. Uncle Morty seems to embody the dream, but Jacob insists he is an exception; most of the rest of the characters struggle to survive the economic woes of the Depression.
Impact
Although some commentators see Awake and Sing! as a topical play about the economic hardships of the Depression, most see the Depression as simply the backdrop to a more universal exploration of family conflicts. The play is also seen as a forerunner in its portrayal of Jewish American life and of the immigrant and minority experience more generally, influencing such later Jewish writers as Arthur Miller, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow and even African American writers such as James Baldwin.
Bibliography
Cantor, Harold. Clifford Odets: Playwright-Poet. 2d ed. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2000.
Murray, Edward. Clifford Odets: The Thirties and After. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1968.
Novick, Julius. Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish American Drama and Jewish American Experience. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.