Depression-era play still resonates

Clifford Odets’ celebrated play “Awake and Sing!” about a Jewish family in the Bronx struggling to survive during the Depression, has been revived innumerable times since its Broadway debut as a Group Theatre production in 1935. The Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles mounted the play 20 years ago, with Elina de Santos as director. Now de Santos is helming another revival of the show at the Odyssey. She said the work is one of her favorite vehicles, particularly because of the way Odets uses language.

“The vernacular is so clear,” de Santos emphasized. “One of the main things that I love about the play is how it sounds. ‘Where’s advancement down the place? Work like crazy.’ That’s the opening line the young son says.” The son, Ralph (James Morosini), feels frustrated in what he views as a dead-end job and dreams of “making it” in some way.

The play is an ensemble piece, and de Santos said Odets, who leaned very much to the left politically, was taking a hard look at the Depression. “All of these characters are struggling to have a voice. That’s why it’s called ‘Awake and Sing.’ They’re all trying to survive and to express themselves. And I don’t mean in an artsy way, not ‘because I want everybody to hear my voice.’ It’s ‘How can I be a man; how can I be a woman, with the economic pressures, the economic imbalance, the inequality?’ Could we be any more ‘now’ than all of these themes?”

De Santos observed that everything in the play is about how it feels to be a disenfranchised population, and that each character experiences that in a different way. The mother, Bessie (Marilyn Fox), is struggling to keep her family together. “She’s sure that she will be out on the street,” de Santos said. “She has become the mother and the father, because the father (Robert Lesser) doesn’t have the guts that she has. He’s a dreamer. The kids both want to find their way, but they’re tied — tied by circumstance, by there not being enough money. How do you get ahead? Then there’s the rich uncle (Richard Fancy), who helps them a little bit, but not very much, and the grandfather (Allan Miller) who talks about Marxism.” 

There’s also the daughter, Hennie (Melisa Paladino), who is pregnant by a man who abandoned her and is pressured into a loveless marriage while lusting after the love of her life, the family boarder (David Agranov).

De Santos added that she relates personally to this family for many reasons. Although she is not Jewish, she said there is a Jewish connection in her ancestry. “Interestingly enough, since I did that production 20 years ago, it has come to my attention that my great-grandfather de Santos was a converso. 

“My great-grandmother, for whom I was named, Elina, married him, and she was disinherited from her family.”

And, the director said, her father had been a successful exporter of steel through the 1930s, ’40s and early ’50s, but by the time she came on the scene, those kinds of contracts had disappeared, so he no longer had a business, and, like the family in the play, they were very poor.

“It was hand to mouth all the time,” de Santos recalled. “I was baby-sitting and working by the time I was 11. I never had any spending money other than what I made myself. There just wasn’t money. We had a house. We were lucky to have that. We had property because of all the money he had made before, but he didn’t work for most of my childhood.”

Yet, she maintained, she never felt like a victim, and nobody in the play acts like a victim either. “They’re fighting all the time to not be a victim, and they’re not. You’re only a victim if you stop fighting. And both the kids don’t stop fighting. They keep going, as does Bessie. She keeps going. She just manipulates.” 

However, de Santos stressed that although Bessie is controlling and seems to squelch her children’s dreams, she is not a villain. At one point, Ralph accuses her of never having bought him skates, and she replies, “I bought a new dress?”

“You know that she didn’t buy a new dress,” de Santos said. “You know she didn’t have any luxuries. You know that she’s not doing this for herself. She’s doing it for survival and so her kids can have a life.”

Ultimately, the children awaken to their destinies, and de Santos feels the playwright is showing that people can always find a way to discover their rightful path in this world. “There is a way, if you have the kishkas,” de Santos said, “to believe in yourself and believe that you can — and I’m not talking about having money — I’m saying that you can find a way to express yourself.

“It’s vital to really living your life to be able to find — if it’s art, great, whatever it is — find something that will awaken your spirit to express who you are and have a life, because otherwise we’re just dead or asleep. And I think that’s what he’s saying: ‘Awake — sing.’ ”

“Awake and Sing!” runs through Nov. 29 at the Odyssey Theatre. For more information, visit this story at odysseytheatre.com.