Awake and Sing! by Clifford Odets

First published: 1935

First produced: 1935, at the Belasco Theater, New York City

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The early 1930’s

Locale: East Bronx, New York

Principal Characters:

• Bessie Berger, a domineering mother
• Myron Berger, her idealistic husband
• Ralph Berger, their son
• Hennie Berger, their daughter
• Jacob, Bessie’s father
• Uncle Morty, Jacob’s affluent son, Bessie’s brother
• Moe Axelrod, a one-legged veteran, the Bergers’ boarder
• Sam Feinschreiber, Hennie’s husband
• Schlosser, the building superintendent

The Play

In Awake and Sing! three generations of the working-class Berger family are jammed into an East Bronx apartment not unlike that in which Clifford Odets grew up. The family revolves around Bessie, the forceful mother. The Bergers are respectable—Bessie sees to that, whatever the cost of respectability.

Odets reminds his audience early in the play that, to Bessie, respectability and proper outward appearances mean more than anything else. As her father Jacob, a retired barber and a Marxist, cuts the hair of his well-to-do son Morty, who is visiting, Bessie tells the old man not to get hair on the floor because she likes her house to look respectable.

Bessie’s son Ralph, a shipping clerk, earns a pittance and turns most of it over to Bessie to help with household expenses. He is in love with Blanche, an innocent girl whose parents have died. She has been reared by two aunts and an uncle, none of whom has much zeal for assuming responsibility for her. Bessie makes it clear to Ralph that he cannot think of marrying Blanche, because the family needs his income.

A family crisis occurs when Hennie becomes pregnant, apparently as a result of making love with a sailor beneath the boardwalk at a seaside resort. Bessie, ever conscious of public opinion and zealous to preserve the appearance of respectability, finds an immediate solution to Hennie’s problem: She foists her off on Sam Feinschreiber, a naïve immigrant, who will believe that the baby is his. Hennie is reluctantly married to Sam, and the child arrives.

When Ralph discovers that Bessie has forced Hennie to be married, he is outraged. He rants at his mother, without effect, because Bessie’s value system is so different from Ralph’s that she cannot understand his fury. Ralph confronts his grandfather, asking him whether he knew of the deception. Jacob admits that he did, and Ralph condemns him for not preventing it. Jacob, using age as his excuse, exhorts Ralph to be more a man of action than he; then, characteristically, he retreats to his bedroom and plays his favorite Enrico Caruso recording, “O Paradiso.”

His sanctum is violated, however, by Bessie, who bursts in and angrily smashes his favorite recording; she then imperiously orders him to walk the dog on the roof of the apartment house. Jacob takes this opportunity to fling himself from the roof. As the beneficiary of his grandfather’s three-thousand-dollar insurance policy, Ralph now has the wherewithal to be married to Blanche. He refuses Jacob’s bequest, however, saying that he cannot make her his wife until he can support her at more than a subsistence level, even though marriage at this point would improve Blanche’s situation substantially.

Meanwhile, Bessie’s husband Myron, who attended (but did not complete) law school while Bessie worked two years in a stocking factory to help support them, thinks that his fortunes will change when he wins the Irish Sweepstakes. He invests fifty cents in a ticket at every opportunity. He also plays the horses, winning small amounts just frequently enough to encourage him. Convinced that the government would not allow such enterprises to be run in a dishonest manner, Myron harbors the dream that he might win, and this cherished—if unrealistic—hope keeps him betting.

Before the action of the play begins, Moe, who boards with the Bergers, had raped Hennie, then a virgin. She has a love-hate relationship with Moe, but she would gladly have married him instead of Sam. Moe would not encumber himself, however, with such a marriage. Instead, he becomes the spoiler, persuading Hennie to leave her husband and child and run off with him to Havana; she does so with Ralph’s support.

As the play ends, Odets offers little hope for its characters. Despite his dramatic soliloquy proclaiming that he has been reborn and that he will awake and sing, Ralph has not undergone a change in personality sufficient to convince audiences that he will be much different from his grandfather, who lived on pipe dreams and vague, garbled socialistic notions. Odets has Ralph discover after the old man’s death that although Jacob had many books, most of their pages were uncut.

Dramatic Devices

Ralph Berger represents the ideological center in Awake and Sing! He is an idealistic dreamer, potentially a doer rather than a passive member of society, but like his grandfather, he lacks the self-assurance and commitment required to act. Ralph fumbles every opportunity that comes his way and undergoes no convincing change during the play. The device Odets uses to emphasize Ralph’s inaction is the leitmotif of the mail plane that regularly flies over the Berger apartment on its way to Boston. Ralph reveals that hearing this airplane takes him back to the distant sounds of trains or the horns of ocean-bound ships going down the river, sounds he heard in his youth as he lay in bed at night. Ralph craves escape more than a resolution of his or society’s problems. The recurrent sound of the mail plane emphasizes his desire, which prompts him to encourage Hennie to run off, quite irresponsibly and unrealistically, with Moe. Ralph is the same kind of passive idealist his grandfather was. He will not change the world, his vigorous soliloquy notwithstanding.

Another device Odets controls successfully in Awake and Sing! is the symbolic use of food and eating. Bessie must worry about immediate survival in an uncertain world while her men concern themselves with broader social problems. She must somehow put food on the table. She denies herself, saying that she can get by on a fried egg and a piece of bread, and so becomes a willing martyr who puts the welfare of her family first.

Early in the play, Moe complains that there is no fruit in the house, only an apple. Odets tellingly ties this remark to Myron’s complaint at the end of the play that there has been no fruit in the house lately except for a lone apple, indicating the Bergers’ hopeless straits. On a basic level, these allusions reinforce the play’s overt references to poverty, such as Ralph’s never being able to have a new suit or have his teeth fixed.

Critical Context

Awake and Sing! is based upon I’ve Got the Blues, which Odets wrote around 1933 and which was never performed professionally, although the Group Theatre, of which Odets was a member, gave it a reading. The earlier play is filled with Yiddish-English dialect, which has been tempered somewhat but not eliminated from this play. Schlosser was not a character in the earlier play, in which Hennie and Moe are separated at the end when Moe is arrested for his underhanded dealings. Guided by the Group Theatre’s notion of avoiding starring roles, Odets wrote Awake and Sing! with only two minor characters, Sam and Schlosser. The other parts are essentially equivalent to one another in length and dramatic importance.

When Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, an agitprop tour de force that he wrote in three days and that won the George Pierce Baker Drama Cup of Yale University and the New Theatre-New Masses Theatre Contest, was performed Off-Broadway in early January, 1935, his future was assured. This one-act play aroused audiences to fever pitch, and everyone wanted to see it. Odets had been promised a Broadway performance for Awake and Sing!, but the Group was slow to fulfill its promise. With the success of Waiting for Lefty, however, Awake and Sing! was rushed to Broadway, where it was well received. For a time, it was on a double bill with Waiting for Lefty; then Odets wrote Till the Day I Die (pr., pb. 1935), a short play about communism in Nazi Germany, that could be billed with Waiting for Lefty as a full evening’s theater program.

By the fall of 1935, Odets, formerly a virtually unknown actor in the Group company, was the toast of Broadway. His fourth major drama, Paradise Lost, opened on December 9, 1935, at the Longacre Theater under Harold Clurman’s direction. During the Depression era, when one might have expected theatergoers to seek escapist entertainment, Odets was remarkably successful as a playwright who spotlighted the social problems that everyone was facing. Paradise Lost has much the same tone as Awake and Sing!, although the family in Paradise Lost is of a higher social class and is faced with the loss of everything.

Contemporary reviewers compared Awake and Sing! with Bella and Samuel Spewack’s Spring Song (pr. 1934) and, because of the Yiddish dialect the play invoked, with Montague Glass and Charles Klein’s Potash and Perlmutter (pr. 1913). Such comparisons, however, are superficial. Because he confronted current social problems, Odets is probably more accurately compared to Sidney Kingsley or to Paul Green, who wrote Johnny Johnson: The Biography of a Common Man (pr. 1936).

Sources for Further Study

Brenman-Gibson, Margaret. Clifford Odets, American Playwright: The Years from 1906 to 1940. New York: Atheneum, 1981.

Cantor, Harold. Clifford Odets: Playwright-Poet. 2d ed. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2000.

Clurman, Harold. The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the Thirties. 1961. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1983.

Cooperman, Robert. Clifford Odets: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1935-1989. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990.

Demastes, William W. Clifford Odets: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990.

Mendelsohn, Michael J. Clifford Odets: Humane Dramatist. DeLand, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1969.

Murray, Edward. Clifford Odets: The Thirties and After. New York: F. Ungar, 1968.

Odets, Clifford. The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets. New York: Grove Press, 1988.

Shuman, R. Baird. Clifford Odets. New York: Twayne, 1962.

Weales, Gerald. Odets: The Playwright. New York: Methuen, 1985.