Word: sing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Awake and Sing...
Another playwright Brustein would not touch with a 20-foot curtain rod is Clifford Odets, author of the Huntington's latest offering, Awake and Sing. Odets was one of the most prominent American playwrights of the 1930s, working with the Group Theater, the idealistic, left-wing venture that helped bring the modern theater to the United States. Odets first hit the big time with his Socialist one-act, Waiting for Lefty, which supposedly had audiences on their feet, yelling "Strike! Strike...
Awake and Sing, his first full-length play, is a leftist, Jewish melodrama, something that Chekhov would have written if he had grown up in the Bronx and been named Blumberg. It treads on ground that we seen many times before: the Berger apartment on the Grand Concourse looks just like Neil Simon's place in Brighton Beach, Woody Allen's old home under the roller coaster at Coney Island, and even Alexander Portnoy's house of horrors in Newark. But this is not nostalgia; the fuzzy sentimentalism of memory is replaced here with a genuine anger, and even...
Despite the limitations of this particular production, it is a pleasure to break free of the Brustein-dominated Cambridge theater scene and see how the other half emotes. Realism in drama and an emphasis on the text is not dead, as the Huntington continually proves. Awake and Sing is a play about finding hope in a world crushed under the weight of materialism and selfishness. Whether or not the play makes its case, the fact that it is being done in Boston--and done so faithfully, too--is no small cause for rejoicing...
...Sunday before we moved to Sodom, I went with my daughter to church, a sweet little Methodist church in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Except to mark an occasional death I have not been much of a churchgoer lately, but on this Sabbath my girl Whitney was to sing solo, and I felt drawn to a front pew, aisle. I am happy to report she did herself and her old man proud, and I carried the memory of her lovely performance with me to the city (she stayed on to see to her schooling) as well as something the preacher said...