Making It New: 1900–1945 425(1935) by Odets. Two other characters in another play by Odets, Night Music (1940),
sum up the positive feelings with which these plays are charged. “Where there is life
there is hope, in my humble opinion,” observes one. “Only the living can cry out
against life.” The other’s comment, or cry, is much simpler: “Make this America for us!”
Of all the dramatists associated with the Group Theatre, Odets is at once the
most significant and the most symptomatic. He was a member of the company
from the beginning, an actor in many of the earlier productions. When he finally
convinced the directors that he was a playwright, his name became almost
synonymous with the Group. They produced seven of his plays, where no other
dramatist had more than two: Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing! (1935), Till the Day
I Die (1935), about the struggle of the German communists at the beginning of the
Hitler regime, Paradise Lost, Golden Boy, about a young Italian-American violinist
whose desire for wealth leads him into boxing and then into death, Rocket to the Moon
(1938), and Night Music. Odets continued his career after the Group broke up. Among
his later plays are The Big Knife (1948), which explores power and corruption in the
film industry, and The Country Girl (1950), a backstage drama about an alcoholic
actor’s return to theater life. But the plays written for the Group Theatre represent his
major achievement. They are marked by a language that captures a particular urban
rhythm and utilizes a tough, oblique way of speaking, a hardboiled mask for sentiment.
Like a skillful cartoonist, Odets exaggerates, subtly, exploits milieu- oriented metaphor
(“I wouldn’t trade you for two pitchers and an outfielder”), uses repetition and the
clichés of everyday speech (“So go fight City Hall!”). The result is a stylized language
that feels realistic, while avoiding the flatness of most real speech or the fixed
exaggerations of dialect. It is the perfect tool for his purpose: which is to capture the
humor, the gloomy fatality, and the burning beliefs of the ordinary people who are his
subjects – the urban lower middle class from which Odets himself came.
So in Awake and Sing!, perhaps his finest play, we are introduced to a series of
characters who, Odets tells us, “share a fundamental activity: a struggle for life
amidst petty conditions.” They are the Berger family, living in the Bronx – where
Odets was born – trying to get along and get by, caught between the ugliness of their
given circumstances and their sometimes cheap dreams of something better. Awake
and Sing! is a play of enormous vitality, not least because it captures this family warts
and all: their arguments and cruelty, their moments of kindness and affection, the
web of apparently aimless conversation that holds them together and embodies
their shared life. At the center of the drama is a typical Odets protagonist: Ralph
Berger, the son, a young man on the edge of life and about to make his discovery,
right or wrong, of where he is going. Ralph wants, he says, “a chance to get to first
base.” He is given plenty of advice by others – some bad and some good. The
good advice is given to him by his grandfather Jacob, a socialist who believes in a
revolution that should be both political and personal. “Wake up!” he tells Ralph, “Be
something. Make your life something good ... take the world in your two hands and
make it new.” Jacob later quotes the verse from Isaiah that gives the play its title:
“Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; and the earth shall cast out the dead.” And,
by the end, Ralph has taken the advice to heart. “I’m one week old!” he announces.GGray_c04.indd 425ray_c 04 .indd 425 8 8/1/2011 7:53:57 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 57 AM