THE centenary of playwright Clifford Odets, a key figure in American theater history, is certainly worth celebrating, and last night the Lincoln Center Theater duly celebrated with a production of his most popular play, “Awake and Sing!”
This star-studded production, shrewdly staged at the Belasco by Bartlett Sher, with Ben Gazzara, Mark Ruffalo and one of Britain’s greatest actresses, American-born Zoë Wanamaker, does Odets proud – or as proud as Odets can now be done.
Granted, it was he who opened the door to blue-collar realism in the English-speaking theater. Without Odets – and the Group Theatre of Harold Clurman and Lee (“The Method”) Strasberg, which staged him – we might not have had Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams or the final masterpieces of Eugene O’Neill.
A play about the struggling Berger family in the depths of the Depression, “Awake and Sing!” is simple to the point of being simplistic – nothing more than an appeal for idealism, a politically socialist idealism, set against the mercenary capitalism Odets felt was strangling America.
The significance of Odets is scarcely his storytelling or corny dramatic structure, but his ability to listen to the way people actually spoke. He didn’t always hear it accurately, but he listened.
He owed more to Elmer (“Street Scene”) Rice, an even earlier American pioneer, than is usually acknowledged, yet it was Odets who gave the American theater the electric jolt it needed.
So, is “Awake and Sing!” a great play? Not really.
The cast of the 1935 original included Morris Carnovsky, Jules Garfield (later known as John Garfield) and Stella and her brother Luther Adler.
Was that cast better than this? Garfield as the young idealist Ralph – who learns that life has to be more than something “printed on a dollar bill” – must have been extraordinary, but then so is the present Ralph, the gangling and passionate Pablo Schreiber.
Despite my admiration for Stella Adler, I doubt whether she could have given a more subtly layered performance than Wanamaker gives as Bessie, the gutsy, duplicitous matriarch of the Berger clan.
There is some lovely acting going on in this dull and sensible Bronx apartment, including Jonathan Hadary’s painfully convincing henpecked husband, and the gruff-voiced, beaten-down Gazzara as Grandfather Jacob, lost in his books and Caruso records.
Then there’s Lauren Ambrose (beautifully surfacing from TV’s “Six Feet Under”) as the flightily desperate daughter; Ruffalo playing the embittered wiseguy war veteran who wants her; and Ned Eisenberg as the ruthlessly successful Uncle Morty from the garment trade – clichés all, whom the actors have transformed into life.
Still, no contemporary actor could re-create the white-hot images Odets’ play must have suggested to cast and audience alike 71 years ago.
Most art has a limited shelf life: First it’s fresh; then, if it’s lucky like “Awake and Sing!,” a period piece or curiosity; and finally, if it’s very, very good, a classic.
“Awake and Sing!” is unlikely to achieve classic status. But then, David Hare’s “Stuff Happens” seems startlingly good today. Yet how will it seem in 2077?
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AWAKE AND SING!
[** 1/2] (Two and one-half stars)
The Belasco Theatre, 111 W. 44th St.; (212) 239-6200.