Awake and Sing!

Awake and Sing! (1935), a drama by Clifford Odets. [Belasco Theatre, 184 perf.] The Bergers, a lower‐middle‐class Jewish family in the Bronx, are a miserable lot. The mother, Bessie ( Stella Adler), is shrill and selfish; the father, Myron ( Art Smith), a drudging ne'er‐do‐well; and their unmarried daughter, Hennie ( Phoebe Brand), is pregnant with an unwanted child. If there is any hope for redemption, it rests with the Berger son, Ralph ( Jules, later John, Garfield), a bitter but ambitious young man, and his grandfather, Jacob ( Morris Carnovsky), who long ago found his consolation in philosophy. Seeing only one way out for Ralph, Jacob quietly makes him the beneficiary of his $3,000‐life insurance policy, then “accidentally” falls from the roof of their tenement. His death allows Hennie to run away with Moe Axelrod ( Luther Adler), a crippled war veteran who offers her financial security. It also liberates Ralph: “Did Jake die for us to fight for nickels? No! ‘Awake and sing,’ he said . . . I saw he was dead and I was born!” Ralph departs, resolved to become a left‐wing agitator. In the uneasy climate of the Great Depression, John Mason Brown considered the play “a well‐balanced, meticulously observed, always interesting and ultimately quite moving drama.” A number of critics saw something Chekhovian in the Group Theatre presentation (though without Chekhov's gift of understatement). The drama was revived on Broadway in 1939, 1970, 1984, and Off Broadway in 1979, but it never proved as potent as the original.