Word: plays
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Stripped to the bone, Rocket to the Moon is a triangle play: the story of a kindly, thin-blooded, tired dentist (Morris Carnovsky) who has accepted life at prevailing odds, surrendered to routine, "gone to sleep." His bitter nagging wife and his sinister, mocking father-in-law (Luther Adler) appreciate his goodness, yet cannot help taunting him. From a romantic young girl (Eleanor Lynn) in his office who is fighting to live, do, go somewhere, and who loves him. he gets sympathy. Suddenly he finds himself in love with her. But when the showdown comes, he stays with his wife...
...reason Odets has gained and held a public that, by & large, does not share his Leftish ideas is obviously not the ideas themselves but his rich, compassionate, angry feeling for people, his tremendous dramatic punch, his dialogue, bracing as ozone. In every Odets play, regardless of its theme or its worth, at least once or twice during the evening every spectator feels that a fire hose has been turned on his body, that a fist has connected with his chin...
Last week the Group Theatre produced Odets' sixth play, Rocket to the Moon. In Odets' own phrase, it is a play about middle-class love. Its people, running true to form, are frustrated, mired; but this time Society is not the villain...
Odets does not encase this eternal situation in the snug, tight frame of the well-made Broadway "domestic drama.'' Heaving, racked, volcanic, the play belches the hot subterranean lava of its characters' anger, helplessness, pain. It draws back their skin to leave every nerve exposed. In its best scenes Rocket to the Moon is blisteringly real, its dialogue forks and spits like lightning from a scornful...
Like Awake and Sing!, like Paradise Lost, like confusion itself, the new play does not move in a straight line. In his social-minded plays Odets has drawn people who are confused because a materialistic society pulls them one way, their instincts another. But in Rocket to the Moon psychological dislocations result from a clash of temperaments, a lack of drive. And Odets will not stay with his plot. He pursues a mystical theme which overrides it: the need for love to vitalize human lives. Inoculated with this virus, his characters cease to be individuals in a specific situation, turn...