THEATER CHRONICLE
As
SHAKESPEARE
has been said to have populated all corners of
history and legend with "deathless Englishmen," so Clifford Odets seems
to have resettled America and even China
(The General Died at Dawn)
with citizens of the Bronx. The salient feature of
Golden Boy
(Belasco
Theater), which is supposed to be a play about an Italian boy named
Bonaparte who wanted to be a violinist but became a prizefighter instead,
is that it is not at all about an Italian boy but about that same talkative,
histrionic Jewish family to which Mr. Odets has introduced us before.
Golden Boy
again demonstrates the lesson of
Paradise Lost:
that Mr.
Odets appears to be psychically glued to the material of his first play.
He cannot advance beyond
Awake and Sing:
he can only revive it with
different costumes, scenery, and (sometimes) accents. That the refur-
bishing of the material implies its adulteration seems not to concern
Mr. Odets, who perhaps imagines that he is exploring genuinely new
horizons; but to those who have admired
Awake and Sing,
each new
play seems a more shocking caricature of the first.
It is well known that actors who have been playing for a long time
in the same play will, unless disciplined by a vigilant stage manager,
"hoke" their performances more and more. A giggle becomes a laugh;
a catch in the throat, a sob; a tremor, a spasm. This is a form of auto-
intoxication which is psychologically necessary for the type of player
who must "feel" his performance. He must behave more and more
violently in order to sense that he is acting. This law of diminishing
returns from a given stimulus is, of course, observable in every field of
sensibility, and its workings are particularly striking in the case of Mr.
Odets. The narrowness of his invention, the monotony of his subject-
matter have anaestheticized him to the point where he must wade in blood
and tears in order to feel that he is writing a play; he must turn the
Belasco Theater into a Grand Guignol to believe it a play-house.
Thus the simple Bronx apartment-dwellers of
Awake and Sing
appear
in
Golden Boy
dressed up as gangsters, prizefighters, and tarts. Mr. Odets
has taken a collection of types out of any underworld film, and on them
he has grafted the half-ludicrous, half-touching cultural aspirations, the
malapropisms, the pride in material possessions, the inarticulate longing
for sunny life, that make up the Odets formula of frustration. The
Chekhovian baggage of middle-class futility with which Mr. Odets
equips these low-life stereotypes is, of course, fearfully inappropriate to
the milieu of lust, murder, crime, and perversion in which they must
travel. The voices are the dreamy, ineffectual voices of the little people
of the world; the deeds are the deeds of the headliners. This contradic-
tion between form and substance gives the play the aspect of a fancy-
dress ball; there is the same grotesquerie, the same stridency, the same
laughable yet indecent incongruity.
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