The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [55]
The best plays of the thirties were both more serious and more literary than the drama of the previous generation. Plays like Of Mice and Men and Tobacco Road exposed theatergoers to a world of rural immiseration utterly foreign to them. In They Shall Not Die, John Wexley bluntly condemned the police, attorney, and judges responsible for locking up the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black men who had been falsely, and sensationally, charged with raping two white women in 1931. In There Shall Be No Night, of 1940, Robert Sherwood, who in previous works had denounced militarism and declared an equal pox on all the houses of Europe, reversed himself and urged his listeners to accept the necessity of war to defend democracy against totalitarianism. Meanwhile, the protean Orson Welles was shocking audiences with a haunting voodoo version of Macbeth set in Haiti, as well as a modern-dress interpretation of Julius Caesar.
As Kaufman, the master satirist and wit, was the prototypical playwright of his age, so Clifford Odets, the inflamed pamphleteer, was the emblematic figure of Broadway in the thirties. Odets was a struggling actor who in the early thirties had joined the Group Theatre, a cooperative that brought together actors like Lee J. Cobb, John Garfield, and Franchot Tone; directors like Elia Kazan; and instructors like Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler. Though the Group Theatre was not originally politicized, many of its members, and above all Odets, were deeply marked by the growing radicalization of the time. In 1934, Odets, who had never had a play produced, wrote Waiting for Lefty, an anticapitalist tract barely disguised as a drama. In a thrilling coup de théâtre, the actors turned to address the audience directly, turning the theater into a union hall and the spectators into fellow workers; at the climax, when word arrived that the heroic Lefty had been murdered by company goons, first the actors, and then the patrons in the seats, took up the cry “Strike! Strike! Strike!”—and the identification was complete. Waiting for Lefty ran for 168 performances on Broadway and was subsequently performed by special troupes all over the country, several of whom were dragged off to jail by outraged local authorities.
Odets turned out to be a gifted playwright who knew how to reproduce real feelings and real speech; he quickly learned to embed the doctrine in the narrative. Jacob, the embittered patriarch of Awake and Sing!, views capitalism as legalized theft and is given to such stony pronouncements as “If this life leads to a revolution it’s a good thing. Otherwise, it’s for nothing.” Odets seems to share Jacob’s views, yet Awake and Sing! is far from the blunt agitprop spirit of Waiting for Lefty, which it followed by only a year. The play revolves around the struggle of a young man to break free from his all-consuming mother. Awake and Sing! has something of O’Neill’s harsh realism, though it is at the same time infused with Odets’s fervid romanticism about human prospects. The dialogue abounds with the Yiddish turns of speech—“You gave the dog eat?”; “He should talk to you an old man?”—that Moss Hart and S. N. Behrman must have heard at home every day, but would never have dreamed of putting into a play. The world of Broadway is all but invisible from the family’s Bronx tenement; Jacob’s son Myron absentmindedly picks his teeth as his daughter reads of the doings of Sophie Tucker. What matters, finally, is not political revolution but personal liberation—“Get-what-it-takes,” as one character puts it. Myron doesn’t have it; life has squashed him flat. But Ralph, Myron’s son and the play’s protagonist, just might. Jacob makes Ralph the beneficiary of his will and then, horribly, arranges his own death. And Ralph, finally independent, accepts the dreadful sacrifice with joy. “I saw he was dead and I was born,” he declares,