Awake and Sing!

Michael Attenborough, the Almeida’s Artistic Director, directs Stockard Channing in Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing!

Starkly dramatic and vividly comic, Awake and Sing! tells the story of the Bergers, a lower-middle-class, three-generation Jewish family living in a Bronx apartment during the1930s. The family, ruled over by strong-willed matriarch Bessie, long for a better world for themselves.

True to life in his depiction of the extreme economic hardships confronted by working-class immigrant families during the 1930s, Odets documents their travails and their hopes, capturing the frenetic, pressured existence in this crowded home.