Review: Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! Gets a Fresh, Riveting Revival

Over the past decade, we’ve seen avant-garde, minimalist revivals of classic plays produced on big stages with A-list celebrities and high ticket prices, thanks to starry reimaginings from the likes of Ivo van Hove and Jamie Lloyd. But Sea Dog Theater’s classy, intimate production of Clifford Odets’s Depression-era drama Awake and Sing! proves that you don’t need a Broadway budget to strip a show down to its bare essentials.

That should be obvious, but many off-Broadway revivals of old plays, especially American chestnuts, tend toward the stuffily literal, attempting verisimilitude with limited resources. Odets’s 1935 play is usually staged on a slice-of-life apartment set. So it’s all the more refreshing that director Erwin Maas reawakens a text distinguished by its period language and period politics with jolting new imagery.

In Maas’s staging, the Berger family, a struggling Jewish clan in the Bronx, bicker, berate, and battle inertia across an impossibly long wooden table, often sitting far, far away from one another. (The audience sits on two sides of the stage, behind the long sides of the table.) All props are mimed, except for a single green apple that rests in the center of the table. Scary echoes and intense blue lights track actors during transitions. And when characters exit, they often swiftly appear on TVs, a camera catching their offstage reactions to the scene that’s just played out.

Strikingly, Sea Dog Theater uses the high-vaulted chapel of the Parish of Calvary-St. George’s as its playing space: the Berger family is surrounded, even dwarfed, by a (decidedly non-Jewish) grandeur that they could never achieve in their own lives. There’s already something Chekhovian in the moody paralysis that undergirds most of the characters’ inaction, but the existential dread that roils throughout Maas’s non-literal staging pushes some scenes closer to Sartre. Some sort of force—Is it fear? Is it the Crash? Is it Mom?—keeps the Bergers tortured by their shared entrapment, and Maas sends that anxiety coursing through even the most quotidian exchanges.

 Ralph (Trevor McGhie), the Berger’s restless son, wants “out, and I don’t mean maybe,” in the idiomatic parlance of the play. He’s got a girl, but his mother, Bessie (Debra Walton), will never approve: despite the family’s own poverty, how could he have fallen for a poor orphan? But things are even worse for the unattached Hennie (Daisy Wang), whose pregnancy dooms her to a loveless marriage that her mother orchestrates with frightening precision and speed.

Walton’s Bessie is an immovable dreadnought: she’s set her own tyrannical course long before the events of the play begin, and she doesn’t waste time explaining her unchanging route until a blistering final speech. But, commanding as Walton may be, this Awake and Sing!’s beating heart belongs to McGhie’s sweetly disaffected Ralph, buffeted between despair and idealism in the play’s central inner conflict. McGhie and Gary Sloan, as Ralphie’s put-upon socialist grandfather Jacob, share a moving tenderness that seems to root the characters’ political impulses in an empathy that begins at home. And McGhie, showing how Ralph’s been hardened by his mother’s resistance and the outside world, channels a physical exhaustion that seems to age him by the final scene.

Occasionally, the minimalist approach makes it harder to discern quickly what’s going on: the play’s time-jumps take a while to become clear, and one of Bessie’s most brutal acts of cruelty now takes place more murkily offstage. Actors are also sometimes so far away from each other across the long chapel that it can be difficult to make out all the words.

And though Sea Dog Theater artistic director Christopher J. Domig makes a disturbing impression as the monstrously candid war vet Moe, who hankers for Hennie, it’s perhaps too id-like a performance for a character Odets asks us to root for in the end. When Domig hisses, “What do I think of women? Take ’em all, cut ’em in little pieces like a herring in Greek salad,” we wouldn’t put it past his sadistic-seeming Moe to shift that violent rhetoric into action.

But even when some choices—that version of Moe, the strange surveillance of the offstage cameras—don’t make total sense, this small-scale, large-ambition Awake and Sing! is never less than riveting.