Revival in Manhattan

Awake and Sing (by Clifford Odets; produced by The Group Theatre). Clifford Odets, four years ago a rank newcomer to Broadway, last week had conferred upon him the theatrical equivalent of the Order of Merit: his first full-length play was enthusiastically revived. For two reasons Awake and Sing was worth reviving: 1) it casts light on what he has written since; 2) it remains his best play.

Still tense and tingling is Odets' study of a bewildered, frustrated, dreaming, moodily rebellious Bronx family, caught in economic toils like wet fish in a net. Secret of the play's power is that it is neither orthodox realism nor orthodox social drama, but a series of startling angle shots, a kind of vivid grotesque. Its Jewish humor and pathos spring each from the other's loins. Its people are both more and less than three-dimensional: in their behavior they are often cardboard vaudevillians, but in their speech they are illiterate poets, and in their instincts they can be keen as animals.

Odets has portrayed frustration, bewilderment, man's dream of a better world in all his later plays, sometimes more subtly or more fiercely than in Awake and Sing, but never with so fused and spontaneous an effect. For one thing, Awake and Sing is written with a purity of feeling, a compulsion rather than calculation of purpose, which Odets has never regained. For another, it almost entirely lacks the pretentious, gassy, self-indulgent writing which has done so much to mar Odets' later work. He wrote Awake and Sing as an engrossed child of the theatre, before he went honeymooning with the cosmos, or confused himself with Le Penseur of Rodin.

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