Huntington Brings to Stage Odets Classic Awake and Sing!

Stephen Schnetzer (from left), Michael Goldsmith, Will LeBow, David Wohl, and Eric T. Miller in the Huntington Theatre Company’s production of Clifford Odets’ stirring drama Awake and Sing! Photos by T. Charles Erickson

Clifford Odets’ classic 1935 play Awake and Sing! poignantly depicts the travails of a Depression-era working-class Jewish family intent on salvaging hope from desperate circumstances. It’s a world Odets knew well. A child of Jewish immigrants struggling to survive in the Philadelphia of the early 1900s, Odets found an early home in the left-wing avant-garde, writing starkly honest plays that evoked the economic and political turmoil of the Great Depression.

The current production of the Huntington Theatre Company, Awake and Sing! is directed by Melia Bensussen and runs through December 7 at the Boston University Theatre.

“In Awake and Sing! Clifford Odets beautifully captures the pains and challenges of all nuclear families living in times of social struggle and economic crisis,” says Bensussen, chair of the Emerson College performing arts department. “This great American play articulates the passions and dilemmas of American society and resonates with the same issues that challenge us today as we grapple to make meaning of our lives.” The production marks a return to the Huntington for Bensussen, who directed the The Luck of the Irish in 2012 and Circle Mirror Transformation in 2010.

“Since her gorgeous, moving production of Luck of the Irish, I’ve wanted to bring director Melia Bensussen back to the Huntington to mount a classic,” says Huntington artistic director Peter DuBois. “She has a great passion for Clifford Odets’ work—Awake and Sing! was Melia’s childhood, she once told me. Her talent for telling intimate family stories that play out on a broad social canvas makes now the perfect opportunity for her return.”

Set in 1933, Odets’ drama is the story of three generations of the Berger family, who are living in a cramped Bronx apartment. The play swirls around the powerful family matriarch, Bessie Berger (Lori Wilner). Also living in the apartment are her mild-mannered, ineffectual husband, Myron (David Wohl), their two children, Ralph (Michael Goldsmith) and Hennie (Annie Purcell), Bessie’s father, left-leaning idealist Jacob (Will LeBow), and a boarder she has taken in to bring the struggling family some extra cash. Obsessed with appearances and aching for respectability, Bessie bristles over daughter Hennie’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy and forces her into a loveless marriage to the boarder.

Bessie’s ruthless actions set emotions in the home ablaze, with Jacob at one point exclaiming, “This is a house? Marx said it—abolish such families.” But Bessie’s fierce determination keeps her family afloat, whatever the cost. The result is a gritty, passionate, and ultimately timeless human drama.

Considered Odets’ masterpiece, Awake and Sing! is often compared to Yiddish theater and was the first Broadway play to focus exclusively on Jewish characters. The play has been revived frequently, both on and off Broadway, since its debut in 1935. A 2006 revival by Lincoln Center Theater, timed to celebrate the centennial of Odets’ birth, won the Tony Award for best revival.

The inspiration for the Coen brothers’ 1991 film Barton Fink, Odets quit high school at 17 to become an actor. He was one of the original members of the New York City–based left-wing ensemble Group Theatre, founded by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg, whose name is synonymous with the method acting technique. The collaborative group was committed to counteracting the prevailing sunny, escapist theatrical offerings of the day with unsparing realism and raw emotions and plays that placed moral dilemmas and intimate relationships over heavily plotted scripts.

Odets used a real-life taxi drivers’ strike as the inspiration for his first play, Waiting for Lefty, produced in 1935. A number of successful plays followed, among them Golden Boy and The Country Girl, both made into acclaimed films. A one-time member of the American Communist Party, stemming, he said, from his empathy with the working class, Odets was a prominent target of notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee’s Communist witch hunt in 1952. But the playwright escaped the committee’s blacklist after naming names that had already been named by writer, director, and producer Elia Kazan, a friend and colleague. After this Odets was shunned by much of Hollywood and even accosted in the streets. He later wrote the screenplay for the classic 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success, a searing depiction of Hollywood. He died of cancer in 1963.

The Huntington Theatre Company’s production of Awake and Sing! runs at the BU Theatre, 264 Huntington Ave., Boston, through December 7, 2014. Tickets may be purchased online, by phone at 617-266-0800, or in person at the BU Theatre box office. Patrons 35 and younger may purchase $25 tickets (ID required) for any production, and there is a $5 discount for seniors. Military personnel can purchase tickets for $15, and student rush tickets are also available for $15. Members of the BU community get $10 off (ID required). Call 617-266-0800 for more information. Follow the Huntington Theatre Company on Twitter at @huntington.