February 19: Awake and Sing!

Clifford Odets’ comic drama, Awake and Sing!, widely considered his best play, premiered on Broadway at the Belasco Theater on this date in 1935, in a Group Theater production directed by Harold Clurman. The cast included Luther Adler, Stella Adler, Morris Carnovsky, John Garfield, and Sanford Meisner. Odets’ play tells of the impoverished, three-generation Berger family, living in the Bronx during the Great Depression. In a review of a 2006 revival, Charles Isherwood wrote in the New York Times that “conflict suffuses the stale air with a tension that almost seems to have mottled the walls. Dinner becomes a simmering battle between factions, in which grievances and recriminations are passed around the table along with the salt and pepper.” A Yiddish version of the play was produced by the Federal Theatre Project in 1938. The title is from Isaiah 26:19: “Awake and sing, you who dwell in the dust.”

“Go out and fight so life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills.” —Jacob (Morris Carnovsky), Awake and Sing!