Reviewed by David Spencer
Different times, different social standards, different mores, seemingly for each decade of the 20th Century -- certainly different issues informing the way life is lived and the world is run (despite similar resonances that remain universal throughout the ages) -- and of course it is these era specifics that can so anchor a "contemporary" play in its own time as to make it unrevivable, sometimes surprisingly so, in the wake of reputation and production history.
A mark of distinction, though, even greatness, is when a play embraces its time -- the patois, the culture, the slang, the very things history will alter -- and rather than date the play, they make it the document of an era. Such a one is Clifford Odets' mid-1930s family melodrama Awake and Sing! currently in revival at the Belasco Theatre in a Lincoln Center Production.
About a Jewish family in the Bronx, trying to survive in the midst of depression, it throws together a number of disparate types under the intrusively controlling wing of matriarch Bessie Berger (Zoe Wanamaker), including her restless son Ralph (Paolo Schreiber), yearning to break free and live his own life; and her daughter Hennie (Lauren Ambrose), who hides a dark secret that you figure out fast, maybe fifteen seconds before Bessie does, whereupon she imposes her motherly wiles to deal with it, and the expense of an innocent suitor Hennie doesn't love, the hapless Sam (Richard Topol). Too bad the guy she does love, tough talking young Moe Axelrod (Mark Ruffalo) is the kind of streetwise wheeler-dealer who ain't got the class, see, nor the steady income to be a worthy addition to the family. Which is ironic, seeing as how the others have their own michegoss, such as the Bessie's henpecked an ineffectual husband Myron (Jonathan Hadary); her too-liberal, too-outspokenly Marxist father Jacob (Ben Gazzara); and her brother Morty, a shady garment manufacturer (Ned Eisenberg). The incidents of the play are funny and sad, almost always dire, and the character archetypes so familiar you can practically hum them -- but it pays to remember that when Odets wrote them, they were not a staple of drama, but represented a new candor, a verite glimpse into a vital subculture.
Director Bartlett Sher's production unapologetically embraces the style of the period, and the language rhythms, such that at times it feels like we're watching something like an opera without music, or a black-and-white film, pre-WWII, when realism was still a little stagy. The ensemble handles this with varying degrees of effectiveness -- Ms. Wanamaker is the hands down champion, followed closely by Ruffalo, Ambrose, Hadary, Eisenberg and Topol. Mr. Schrieber seems to miss the balance, and delivers Ralph with an earnestness so overblown as to make you lose patience rather than empathize. As for Mr. Gazzara...well, that's another story. His actual performance, on its own terms, lacks optimal sharpness -- not for lack of talent or intuition, but due to the ravages of age: a higher voice, a softer diction, a narrower vocal range than the actor had in his heyday. But those of us old enough to remember aspects of that heyday (for me it was the TV series Run for Your Life, and his "George" in the first Broadway revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf -- for the generation before mine he's remembered as the original Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, among other such mold-breaking performances) realize how much history and experience walks onto that stage with him, and revel in the fact that he's still swinging. One hopes that those for whom Ben Gazzara was never a household name will sense something of what we know.
Which, come to think of it, may be the point of reviving Awake and Sing! When the curtain goes up, you don't have to have been there to be there; you don't have to have known it to feel it. All you know is, it still speaks through the ages. And that it's so insistently full of life it barely seems like the history lesson pastiching it is, at all...