Awake and Sing!

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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.

Awake and Sing!, play by Clifford Odets, produced and published in 1935.

The Bergers, a poor Jewish family living in the Bronx, struggle for life “amidst petty conditions.” Myron, the father, is a sententious failure; Bessie, his wife and the imperious leader of the household, is obsessed with the need for bourgeois respectability. Jacob, Bessie's father, is a “sentimental idealist with no power to turn ideal to action,” and he encourages the rebellion of his grandson Ralph against their environment. Ralph's sister Hennie, a stenographer, is deserted by her lover after she becomes pregnant, and hurriedly marries her immigrant suitor Sam Feinschreiber, who believes it is his child she bears. She is still sought by her first lover, proud and passionate Moe Axelrod, a one‐legged war veteran whose bitter view of the world is in direct contrast with that of Bessie's brother, Uncle Morty, the Bergers' rich relative. Ralph falls in love with the orphan girl Blanche, to the intense displeasure of his practical mother. His unhappiness and that of the others cause Jacob to commit suicide in order that Ralph may have his insurance. During this crisis, Hennie abandons Sam and her baby to elope with Moe. Ralph, realizing the significance of his grandfather's teachings and the selfishness of his love for Blanche, gives the money to the family and resolves to devote himself to radical agitation for an improved order of society.