Awake and Sing!

Isaiah’s admonishment to Jews dwelling in the dust that they “awake and sing” doesn’t only apply to the characters of Clifford Odets’s breakout 1935 play Awake and Sing!, which is now being revived by Lincoln Center Theater at the show’s original home, the Belasco. The insistent call can also function as a corollary to Hamlet’s often-quoted advice to the players newly arrived at Elsinore. Not only do actors in this play need to speak their speeches trippingly on the tongue, they must make the text “sing.” Anything less leaves the play open to the charge, made by some commentators, that it is “dated.”

Indeed, if a production of Awake and Sing! doesn’t seem organic, it runs the risk of coming across as just another dime-a-dozen dysfunctional family saga as we watch the Bergers, a 1930s family, schlep testily around their fifth-floor Bronx walk-up. And that’s a shame, since the play is actually an outraged screed that asserts in one of its blistering speeches, “Life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills.”

As it happens, four actors in director Bartlett Sher’s revival are singing at the top of their lungs. Ben Gazzara as grandpa Jacob, a bearded and bent barber, is steeped in the world-weariness of a man who’s convinced that Karl Marx has the key to the future but too few people are paying proper attention. Mark Ruffalo, who plays boarder-with-a-million-schemes Moe Axelrod, soaks his caustic remarks in the venom expected of a man who had his leg blasted off while fighting in the Great War for a better world that he has yet to see. Round-faced Jonathan Hadary, as house-husband Myron, gets many laughs as a weak man surviving only because he’s learned how to make weakness his strong suit. Ned Eisenberg, an actor who has not received sufficient recognition over the course of his notable career, radiates ruthless wisdom as Uncle Morty, a man whose double-breasted suit is spanking new and obviously not the only one in his closet.

Unfortunately, three of the other actors don’t seem to feel the play in their bones; instead, they appear to be working from the outside in. Zoe Wanamaker (a three-time Tony Award nominee) and Lauren Ambrose (best known for her brilliant work as Claire Fisher on Six Feet Under) are certainly conscientious about portraying, respectively, the controlling mother Bessie and her increasingly embittered daughter Hennie — but theirs is the careful attention of actors donning mannerisms in the same way that they put on their wigs. In fact, the way in which Wanamaker keeps tucking strands of her hair in place is one of the inspired details in her heavily detailed performance. Missing from the characterization of this usually superlative actress is the obligatory hint that Bessie’s style is born of a concern that anything short of tyranny will doom her family.

Ambrose’s playing isn’t as stiff as the russet wig she wears in the first and third acts, but it also seems acquired rather than lived in. Absent is the chemistry that supposedly continues to bond her to Moe after she’s cornered into a marriage that she doesn’t want in order to provide a father for her baby. Pablo Schreiber as Ralph Berger, the son and heir to whatever the future brings, clearly understands that Odets’s play is really about this character; in essence, Ralph is the one who most needs to awake and sing. But instead of fully seizing the opportunity, he is off-puttingly shrill in the role. This is a major mistake, since the more likeable Ralph is, the more the audience will pull for him.

It isn’t just director Sher’s inability to make his troupe sing in harmony that undercuts the production. Whereas this treatment doesn’t lift off the stage, set designer Michael Yeargan’s apartment — with its mottled dwelling-in-dust wall — actually does leave the ground. During the second act, when Hennie is bored with her marriage and Ralph’s penurious circumstances cost him his girlfriend and Bessie can no longer stand her father’s devotion to Enrico Caruso 78s, the walls of the Berger domicile slowly and rather astonishingly ascend to the Belasco’s commodious fly space. Sadly, the effect is the opposite of what Sher intends, and a play that needs a claustrophobic atmosphere suddenly loses just that quality. The audience, sensing something amiss, is thrown off its concentration.

In words that stalked him later in his life, Odets once declared that “New art work should shoot bullets.” Too much of the time, this production of Awake and Sing! simply shoots blanks.