THEATER CHRONICLE
Golden Boy
is a much more popular play than
Awake and Sing.
The melodramatic nature of- the characters and events would alone
guarantee its success at the box-office. But Mr. Odets has taken out
double insurance against the failure of his work by stuffing it with
familiar Jewish low-comedy jokes and ancient wheezes out of vaude-
ville. Yet, though the stale luridity of characters and plot and the stale
gag-comedy of the lines have been sufficient to keep audiences in the
alternate shivers and stitches to which the underworld film~ have habitu-
ated them, it is not these qualities which have commanded the deferential
attention of both critics and playgoers. Serious people have sat unflinch-
ingly through this play, because they knew or thought they knew that
Mr. Odets had Something To Say, that somewhere in this theatrical
grab-bag there lay a treasure.
Mr. Odets has a theme which in the last century would have been
stated as Money Does Not Bring Happiness. But Mr. Odets conceives of it
in more modern terms. He would summarize it, I suppose, by saying that
the struggle for financial success which the capitalist system tends to im-
pose on the individual is detrimental to personal happiness and to culture.
Stated thus abstractly, the theme does Mr. Odets credit. Concretely
visualized as a choice between playing the violin and fighting in the
prize ring, it already becomes a little obvious, a little tawdry. But,
granting Mr. Odets the virtue of this rather simple-minded antithesis,
one finds that here it has been distorted out of all truth and vulgarized
out of all nobility. In the selection of a superman for a hero lies the es-
sential hollowness of the play, for the choice between culture and money
cannot be valid for a character who possesses two such remarkable gifts.
If Mr. Odets' hero were a potentially great violinist, he could have
become rich or at least prosperous via the concert stage, and he need
never have considered prizefighting as an alternative career. If he
were not, then his abandonment of the violin was surely no tragedy.
But Mr. Odets' juggling of his theme does not stop with this original
false alternative; it eats deeper into the plot. What is the cause of
Bonaparte's downfall and death? His greed for money, his selection of
prizefighting as a life work? Not at all. A purely
accidental,
non-social
circumstance: the fact that the girl he loved felt pity, loyalty, and ten-
derness for another man. One assumes that, were it not for the girl, Mr.
Odets' hero would have been as successful and as long-lived as Jack
Dempsey, Mickey Walker, Gene Tunney, or any other well-known
fighter. He might have even become a
restaurauteur,
or perhaps had
some very satisfying musical conversations with Yehudi Menuhin. Mr.
Odets' social theme, like his formula for the manufacture of characters,
is a carry-over from his first and most sincere play. It is deady in-
operative in the world of macabre melodrama into which he has im-
ported it. That he was forced to use a fortuitous, melodramatic device to
dissolve the elements of his play and bring it to its falsely tragic curtain
is itself an expose of the play's "serious" pretensions.
MARY MCCARTHY
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