AWAKE AND SING!
Fifty-seven years after the play’s first production, Odets remains an angry young man. Given today’s hard times, his intense love for his characters feels right and timely, while the struggles of the Bergers, a poor Jewish family in the Bronx, remain elemental: you see them echoed in Steinbeck’s Joads, Wilder’s Antrobuses, Williams’s Wingfields, Miller’s Lomans, and Simon’s Jeromes. And in real people today. Some conflicts don’t date.
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The Bergers’ desperation, spawned by the sense that they’re paralyzed by their dead-end lives, explodes in the kind of over-the-top style Odets’s Group Theatre favored. The father, Myron, a sententious and self-pitying failure, long ago ceded authority to his imperious wife. Bessie is a corrupting woman terrified of poverty: she pursues bourgeois respectability like a hawk, and assumes that her oft-proclaimed sufferings will excuse her petty cruelties and amoral manipulation. Bessie is that sad creature–a mother who’ll destroy her family in order to save it.
The tie between grandfather and grandson is the play’s one pure relationship. It’s as if Odets had written off an entire generation–Bessie, Myron, Moe, and Morty’s generation–as too embittered by the world war or crushed by the Depression to wonder beyond tomorrow. But with Jacob passing the flame down to Ralph, the play’s optimistic title is justified.
Caught between the singers and the sleepers are willing victims like Rengin Altay’s tough-talking but weak Hennie and her dweebish dupe of a husband, played with an appropriate glumness by David Alan Novak. Where they’re passive, Jeff Perry’s seething Moe is active, snarling and sneering; fortunately, he also shows us why.
