Word: plays
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Odets was an original but minor member of the Group. He never played important parts; in 1932, when he wrote Awake and Sing! he was an understudy. The Group, unimpressed, produced one act of the play privately at its summer theatre. Later, when a Left organization, New Theatre League, wanted a short play for Sunday night showings, Odets fished up Waiting for Lefty, which he had once written in three days...
...surface, since the days of Awake and Sing! Odets and the Group have marched forward hand in hand. Actually Odets has most of the time carried the Group on his back. His have been the Group's only recent successful plays. When Paradise Lost was choking to death, Odets broke his pledge about not succumbing to Hollywood, went there at $2,500 a week, sent back money to keep the play and the Group going. Again, in the summer of 1937. when the Group existed in name only-its leading actors and its one remaining director were...
...plus a 25% interest-shared with his wife-in Golden Boy brought him about $2,000 a week during its seven-month run; the cinema sale means $42,000 more. (He and his wife have a 35% joint interest in Rocket to the Moon.) He looks ahead to writing plays without interruption-has "ten or twelve"' plays already laid out. One, a strike play called The Silent Partner, may be produced by the Group later this season...
...theatre around him does not interest Odets much. He goes to about three shows a year. He has stopped reading all playwrights but Shakespeare and Ibsen: "I have nothing to learn from American plays any more." Acting he calls "a whorish thing." But now & then he would like a good part in someone else's play, simply to retain his feel of the stage...
...matter-of-factly, "Every man of substance somewhere or other or sometime or other in his life has to fulfill a mission." But because Herta is too intellectual, and "woman's task is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world," they separate. Michael writes his play, is rebuffed by Munich intellectuals, becomes a miner in the Ruhr. Then the book really gets creepy. A mysterious Russian, Iwan, appears, tempts Michael, is defeated ("I am stronger than he. I take him by the throat. I dash him to the ground"), and after making some political observations, Michael...