Awake and Sing!
AUDIENCE CONTEXT GUIDE for Olney Theatre Center’s 2014 production
I
ntroduction
Plays, like people, are a product of their time, their parents, and their upbringing. Coming out of the Great Depression and the rise of professional acting companies, Awake and Sing! found a place in the American consciousness and has drawn audiences back again and again. In this guide, we will explore the play’s origin story as well as its legacy.
In this Context Guide, we hope to give you a sense of the people and events that influenced the development of Awake and Sing!. This guide includes background on playwright Clifford Odets and the Group Theatre, an overview of the historical events surrounding the play, a look at the history of the American family drama, and an interview with director Serge Seiden. For further insight into the world of the play, including pictures, videos, and articles, please visit our blog at www. olneyawakeandsing.wordpress.com. If you have any questions or comments about this Context Guide, the blog, or the production itself, please send us a message at education@olneytheatre.org.
From the “Krazy Kat” comic strip by George Herriman.
Table of Contents
Introduction The Playwright: Clifford Odets and the Group Theatre
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The 1930s
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Staging the Family:
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The Evolution of the American Family Drama
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After The Group: Further Innovation
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A History of Awake and Sing!
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Artist Spotlight: Serge Seiden
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The Playwright
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Clifford Odets and the Group Theatre EARLY YEARS
My chief influence as a playwright was the Group Theatre acting company, and being a member of that company ... And you can see the Group Theatre acting technique crept right into the plays...” — Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets was born in Philadelphia in 1906, the son of Russian- and Romanian-Jewish immigrants. He was raised in the Bronx. Odets dropped out of high school at 17 to pursue acting. In 1929, he joined the prestigious Theatre Guild, resulting in two roles on Broadway: as a non-speaking robot in R.U.R. and the understudy for Spencer Tracy in Conflict by Vincent Lawrence. Tracy never missed a performance.
THE GROUP THEATRE Through his acting career, Odets met casting director Cheryl Crawford, who introduced him to then-script reader Harold Clurman. With director Lee Strasberg, Crawford and Clurman founded the Group Theatre, of which Odets was a member actor, in 1931. Odets began writing plays at Clurman’s urging and became the primary playwright for The Group Theatre. Although it only lasted for ten years, The Group’s ensemble-based approach to disciplined, naturalistic work had a huge impact on the American theater. The Group popularized the Stanislavski system of acting, which co-founder Lee Strasberg later developed into The Method. After the dissolution of The Group, members including Elia Kazan, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner continued to shape acting and directing as we know them today.
RISE TO FAME
Odets’ first play to be produced, Waiting for Lefty, was a one-act performed in January of 1935 at a benefit for New Theatre Magazine. The play, depicting a taxi drivers’ strike, was greeted with explosive enthusiasm and 28 curtain calls. Odets was suddenly internationally famous—he appeared on the cover of Time in 1938—and a poster child for the radical politics that Lefty advocated. In the same year, the Group produced Awake and Sing!, a highly influential play in the development of Jewish theater and the American family drama.
Clifford Odets on the cover of Time
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THE MOVE TO HOLLYWOOD
LATER YEARS
Starting in 1936, Odets went to Odets’ final play, The Flowering Peach, Hollywood to pursue screenwriting, drawn had its Broadway premiere in 1954. The by the financial advantages, although play was a finalist for the 1955 Pulitzer he continued to write plays. He worked Prize, and was the preferred choice of the within the studio system and wrote many jury, but Joseph Pulitzer Jr. chose Cat On scripts that were further developed by A Hot Tin Roof instead. other writers. Odets was not credited for In 1963, at age 57, Clifford Odets died many of these works but did accept credit of stomach cancer. The 2006 revival of for screenplays including 1936’s The Awake and Sing! at Lincoln Center drew General Died At Dawn and 1957’s Sweet Smell of Success, in addition to two films renewed interest to Odets’ work, winning he also directed: None But The Lonely the Tony for Best Revival of a Play. Heart (1944) and The Story On Page Revivals of Odets’ early plays became One (1959). In 1937, he married movie more popular as the economic crash in highlighted their continued star Luise Rainer. They divorced in 1940, 2008 relevance. and in 1943 he married another actress, Betty Grayson, until their 1951 divorce. In 1962, Odets signed on to write teleplays for NBC and finished three of the scripts, but he died before any of that work was 25.0% produced.
HUAC In 1952, Odets was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Between 1934 and 1935, he belonged to the Communist Party for less than a year. He avoided being blacklisted by giving names that had already been given by his friend and former colleague Elia Kazan. According to his son, Walt, Odets was tormented by the perception that he had cooperated with HUAC. “By taking the Fifth, you are positing that you have engaged in criminal activity,” Walt Odets said in a 2010 interview with The Jewish Chronicle. He explained that his father did not plead the fifth because he had nothing to hide. Instead, Clifford Odets criticized the proceedings and only gave names that others had already given.
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20.0%
No major legislation addresses the Depression.
15.0%
10.0%
5.0%
0%
Widespread bank The Group failures Theatre is founded. Stock market collapses. t en m oy pl em Un te ra 1929
The Irish Sweepstakes lottery is established.
1930
1931
The 1930s Money in the Great Depression Item
Average Amount c. 1935
Equivalence Today
Average house
$6,300
$109,000
Average car
$580
$10,010
Gallon of milk
47¢
$8.13
5 lb. of flour
25.3¢
$4.33
1 lb. of apples
5.1¢
86.5¢
A dozen oranges
30.1¢
$5.19
Loaf of bread
8¢
$1.38
Postage stamp
3¢
52¢
Average annual salary $1,500
FDR is elected.
Beginning of the New Deal Awake and Sing! takes place
Hitler is elected chancellor of Germany. 100,000 votes are cast for Communist Party candidate William Z. Foster.
Prohibition is repealed.
1932
$25,950
1933
Clifford Odets joins the Communist Party. He leaves 8 months later.
A taxi strike inspires Odets’ Waiting for Lefty.
1934
1935
Beginning of the Spanish Civil War
Japanese ship sinks USS Panay in China; they apologize and pay an indemnity.
1936
1937
1938
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S
taging the Family
The Evolution of the American Family
The American family drama—a standard convention seen in American classics and new work alike—evolved out of European realism, influenced by writers including Chekhov, Strindberg, and Ibsen. Henrik Ibsen is regarded as the father of the genre, codifying the 19th-century naturalistic approach with plays like A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, and Ghosts. By the early 20th century, American realism had taken root and taken off, as demonstrated by the success of realistic family dramas including Odets’ Awake and Sing!, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and the later works of Arthur Miller and Tennesse Williams. ODETS’ TAKE ON REALISM Ellen Schiff writes that rather than glamorizing his characters’ experiences, Clifford Odets was “one of the earliest with the courage to dramatize instead what is true.” She concludes that although he did not invent social realism, Odets popularized it. Even Harold Clurman was wary of Odets’ “messy kitchen realism” when he first read what became Awake and Sing!. According to John Frick’s “The ‘Playwright of the Proletariat,’” it was the rise of the professional acting company that aided “a rediscovery and revaluation of realism.” Odets’ work brought that trend to the forefront by combining it with left-wing politics. Even compared with earlier naturalistic theater, Awake and Sing! stood out with language that critic Alfred Kazin called “brilliantly authentic.” His dialogue, simultaneously lyrical, blunt, and rooted in character, felt fresh and exciting to audiences without breaking the theatrical illusion. “His role in changing the direction of the American theater
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can arguably be compared to Shaw’s in England and Ibsen’s, Strindberg’s, Chekhov’s, and Gorki’s on the continent,” Schiff concludes. DEFENDING THE FORM As the American family drama rose to dominate mainstream stages, its worth as a convention did not go unchallenged. In 1956—the same year that Waiting for Godot introduced a new form to the American stage—Arthur Miller‘s essay “The Family in Modern Drama” defended the genre. Miller argues that while “the modern American audience is so quickly at home with the form, “playwrights have gotten impatient with it... Why does Realism always seem to be drawing us all back to its arms? We have not yet created in this country a succinct form to take its place.”
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Why does Realism always seem to be drawing us all back into its arms? We have not yet created in this country a succint form to take its place.” — Arthur Miller, 1956
To Miller, it is no coincidence that American realistic plays like Awake and Sing! focus on familial relationships. The intimacy of these relationships allow for an emotional intensity and honesty that would not ring true outside the domestic setting. Frick observes that the
Bergers serve as “a microcosm of the social situation,” tackling huge political issues from an angle of intimate, human specificity. In this way, Odets is not limited to “small horizons” as Harold Clurman initially worried, but he is empowered to challenge our largest assumptions about society from a grounded, familiar place. LEGACY In the nearly eighty years since Awake and Sing! first premiered on Broadway, playwrights of all stripes have experimented with theatrical form and changed the ways we view the stage, but the influence of the American family drama is omnipresent. Playwrights from David Mamet to Tony Kushner to Donald Margulies have cited Clifford Odets as a forefather. In 1999, June Schlueter wrote that “Americans’ belief that the nuclear family is the structural given of American life and verisimilitude the formal
given of American theater has sustained a tradition that has defined the American stage at least since Eugene O’Neill.” Together, realism and the family remain intertwined and essential to the field of American drama, influenced by many others but never leaving Odets’ “messy kitchens” too far behind.
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Americans’ belief that the nuclear family is the structural given of American life and verisimilitude the formal given of American theater has sustained a tradition that has defined the American stage...” — Dr. June Schlueter
Set rendering by scenic designer Jack Magaw.
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After The Group: Lee Strasberg
went on to direct The Actor’s Studio, a prestigious acting school. Out of the Group’s roots in Stanislavski, he developed and promoted Method acting. The Method has been highly influential in naturalistic acting ever since.
Cheryl Crawford
founded the American Repertory Theatre in 1946 before working with Group colleagues Elia Kazan and Robert Louis to found The Actor’s Studio, which trained Marlon Brando, James Dean, Jane Fonda, Bea Arthur, and many others.
Harold Clurman,
original director of Awake and Sing!, became an influential critic and director. Awake and Sing! was the first play he directed for the Group. He also wrote seven books about theater, including chronicling the history of the Group.
Sanford Meisner developed the Meisner
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Technique, a procedure of self-investigation for actors. He taught at the Neighborhood Playhouse and The Actor’s Studio. Students included Diane Keaton, Gregory Peck, and David Mamet.
Further Innovation Elia Kazan, after acting professionally, was a cofounder of The Actor’s Studio. In addition to his Tony-winning direction on stage, he became the Oscar-winning director of films including A Streetcar Named Desire, On The Waterfront, and East of Eden. He introduced mainstream audiences to actors including Stella Adler, pictured above as James Dean, Marlon Brando, Bessie in the premiere of Awake Julie Harris, and Andy Griffith. and Sing!, studied with Stanislavski Kazan was criticized for being in Paris, leading her to part ways a cooperative witness in his with Strasberg’s interpretation. HUAC hearing. After a brief Hollywood career, she acted, directed, and taught in New York, founding the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in 1949. Notable alumni include Robert De Niro, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Elaine Stritch, and Warren Beatty.
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A History of Awake and Sing! WRITING AND REWRITING When Clifford Odets wrote the script that became Awake and Sing! in 1933, its title was “I Got The Blues.” He began it from a place of frustration, underemployed as an actor and stuffed into a chilly apartment. Over the course of two years, Odets worked on the play, hoping that The Group would produce it. Lee Strasberg was dismissive of the script, but Harold Clurman saw potential in it. They had a well-received trial rehearsal of I Got The Blues at Green Mansions in the Adirondacks, but Group founders Clurman, Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford still had reservations. Among them were Bessie’s cruelty, a pessimistic last act, “gross Jewish humor” and the script’s “messy kitchen realism.” In the rewriting process, Odets addressed most of these concerns. The “messy kitchen realism,” however, became a hallmark of his style. With The Group still hesitant to produce, Odets received an offer from producer Frank Merlin. Although Merlin had financial backing, Odets had written the play for The Group’s actors and considered them irreplaceable. Merlin dropped the project. The actors of The Group, who were desperate for new material, agreed to consider the new draft, and their enthusiasm brought the play back to the founders’ attention.
PREMIERE On February 19, 1935, following the success of Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing! finally premiered on 10 Broadway at the Belasco Theatre in
a production directed by Harold Clurman. The cast included Luther Adler (Moe), Stella Adler (Bessie), Morris Carnovsky (Jacob), John Garfield (Ralph), Sanford Meisner (Sam), Phoebe Brand (Hennie), J.E. Bromberg (Uncle Morty), and Roman Bohnen (Schlosser). Critical responses were positive, but more mixed than the responses to Waiting for Lefty the same year. Awake and Sing! ran for 184 performances but reopened two months after closing for 24 additional performances. Just a few years later, when Awake and Sing! was first revived on Broadway, critics gave it, as Harold Clurman wrote, “the reception of an honored classic.”
REVIVALS New York productions of Awake and Sing! have opened off-Broadway in 1970, 1979, 1993, and 1995; they have come to Broadway in 1938, 1939, 1984, and 2006. In 1961, it graced the stage at the Teatro Oficina in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and in 1972, a TV adaptation aired on PBS. The 2006 Lincoln Center production, starring Mark Ruffalo (Moe), Zoe Wanamaker (Bessie) and Lauren Ambrose (Hennie) and directed by Bartlett Sher, won two Tonys, including Best Revival of a Play, out of its eight nominations. In 2007, Stockard Channing starred as Bessie in a production at London’s Almeida Theatre, directed by Michael Attenborough. Awake and Sing! has seen many regional productions across North America, especially following the economic crash of 2008. I Got the Blues, the original script, premiered at Depaul University in 1998.
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Ever since Awake and Sing!, messy kitchens have been serving as a common locus of American drama.” — Ellen Schiff
Bessie (Mia Katigbak) and Jacob (Alok Tewari) in the National Asian American Theatre Company’s 2013 production of Awake and Sing! Photo by William P. Steele.
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Costume rendering by designer Caitlin Rain.
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Pictured opposite: Director Serge Seiden. Photo by Mark Seiden.
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rtist Spotlight:
Serge Seiden, Director
Susanna Pretzer, Dramaturg: You have directed a wide range of work. As a director, what drew you to Awake and Sing!? Serge Seiden: I am so thrilled to be directing a Clifford Odets play. Awake and Sing! is a dream play for me to direct, because it so perfectly fits into the core of the canon of American realistic drama, which is the acting style that I teach. I have been teaching it at Studio Theatre for 17 years and this is the first time that I’ve gotten to actually direct a full-length, full production of one of these great American classics. It’s a real treat. It’s not something that everyone gets to direct. I’ve mostly directed contemporary American plays, so to direct one from the core of the canon is really special and I’m very excited to do it. SP: How do you think Awake and Sing! fits into the tradition of American realism? SS: This is really interesting—I was actually just talking about this with my acting teacher and the founder of Studio Theatre, Joy Zinoman. The tenets of realistic acting have to do with techniques that came from Stanislavski and were then transmitted to the people in the Group Theatre. One of the tenets is given circumstances—as a technique, that is that the events that transpired offstage have to be carried into the scene onstage and have an impact on how the scene is played. Number two is that props and stage business are crucial tools for revealing the inner lives of the characters through subtext. So, business reveals subtext.
What’s wonderful about Awake and Sing!—and other Clifford Odets plays, but particularly Awake and Sing!—is that it is written with these tenets of realism completely integrated. You can’t correctly interpret the scene you are working on unless you understand what the given circumstances are. And every character is written to have props and stage business to help the actor reveal the characters. That’s a small example of the connection between this play and realistic acting. SP: How has Awake and Sing! influenced this style of playwriting since its premiere in 1935? SS: When you watch and listen to Awake and Sing!, you can hear how playwrights
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Continued from Page 13 like Williams and Miller saw this 1935 play or read it and used many of the things they learned from Awake and Sing! in their own plays. Comparing the characters, you could almost say that Glass Menagerie is Williams’ version of Awake and Sing!. It has the same kind of central character trying to decide what to do with his life, it has the same sister, the same kind of mother. In Glass Menagerie the father is gone, but in Awake and Sing!, the father is weak. It’s different because Williams’ play is more condensed, with a smaller cast, but the themes are similar. Both plays are about young men deciding how, given their circumstances, to experience their dreams. Williams gives a completely opposite answer, though. Tom decides to do what Hennie does, to go off and seek adventure. In Awake and Sing!, Ralph stays to share in the burden of his family. There are echoes of Awake and Sing! and its characters in Miller, too, especially in Death of a Salesman. It’s also interesting that Odets was not a very educated man when he joined the Group Theatre, but you can hear in Awake and Sing! his delight in, for example, Shakespeare. He pulls into his play echoes of the plays that he studied when he was with the Group Theatre. There’s an incredible set of lines we were just doing in rehearsal where Morty says to Ralph, “Is that any way to speak to your mother?” And Ralph turns to Morty and says, “Was that any way to speak to your father?” And that parallel line is just like in Hamlet. SP: What is the biggest challenge for you in directing Awake and Sing!? SS: The biggest challenge would be to have an ensemble of actors who are all working in the same style. In a normal regional theater situation where all the actors come from different places and they’re plopped together, it would be 14 very difficult to have an ensemble.
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That idea, of a young person wanting to make up their own mind about what to do with their life, never changes. That’s a universal situation, it’s just that the stakes in his [Ralph’s] particular situation are so high.” — Serge Seiden
But the brilliance of the casting of this production is that most of the actors have known each other and have worked together for many, many years, and so there is a great sense of ensemble among them already that we’re taking advantage of. That would be a challenge, but it isn’t here. SP: What do you think draws theaters and audiences back to Awake and Sing! after nearly eighty years? What relevance does it have today? SS: There’s a topical relevance in that over the last six or seven years of very slow economic growth, there was a parallel, to some extent, of young people graduating from college and not being able to get a job and having to live with their parents. That is the situation that Ralph and Hennie find themselves in. Obviously it’s much more dire; in 1933, 24% of Americans were out of work, and in 2012 it was more like 8.5%. So the comparison isn’t really fair, because it was so much more extreme, but there are some topical echoes. Even today, it’s hard for young people to find a career, and they’re a little bit stymied. But in Awake and Sing!, the story is really about a young man who is pulled in many directions, trying to decide which path he should take. Should he take the revolutionary path that his grandfather
is pushing him towards? Should he go into business like his capitalist uncle, a dress manufacturer? There’s Moe, who says “pick a racket, any racket, and shake down the cocoanuts.” Should he follow the romantic path that his sister is following? He has a girlfriend, Blanche; should he go off and marry her and live a romantic dream? Or should he stay at the job he’s in and do what his father did, just be stalwart and hope that something comes of it. So Ralph has at least five different paths that he could take, but he says, “I want to make up my own mind.” That idea, of a young person wanting to make up their own mind about what to do with their life, never changes. That’s a universal situation, it’s just that the stakes in his particular situation are so high. But I think everybody can identify with that. SP: What would you like the audience to have in mind coming into the show? What do you hope they’ll come away with afterwards?
SS: I hope that they will be patient, because the play was written at a time when going to the theater was an event and the play was meant to last for two and a half hours. You were going there to spend a good length of time with these people and get to know them. So many contemporary plays now are 90 minutes and you’re out, no intermission. At Studio Theatre this season, there’s not one play with an intermission out of eleven plays. So the audience should be patient with the play and treat it like a miniseries. It’s going to be three episodes of an HBO series in one night, sort of like bingewatching. That’s kind of how they should approach the evening. When they leave, I hope that they will not feel like “that was an old chestnut.” I’d like for them to leave feeling like they saw something very fresh and contemporary. I hope it will resonate with them as much as it did at its premiere, so that they could not even realize that it is an old play.
Left to right: Rick Foucheux, Paul Morella, Naomi Jacobsen (center), Alex Mandell, and Laura C. Harris.
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Still curious? Read, watch, and listen more at www.olneyawakeandsing.wordpress.com
This context guide was created by Susanna Pretzer, Dramaturgy Apprentice, and edited by Jason King Jones, Associate Artistic Director and Director of Education, 2014. Cover image: photo by William Roege (1930); back cover image: Works Project Administration poster, 1936-7.