Clash by Night

The scenario couldn’t be more common; what Odets and Artistic Home do with it could hardly be less so. In Staten Island circa WWII, working-class couple Jerry (Ahlstrom) and Mae (Tummelson) are quietly miserable—except Jerry doesn’t know it. When his jokester pal Earl (Miller) moves in, the sparring Mae and Earl are soon wrapped in each other’s arms. What lifts Clash by Night above steamy-affair melodrama—and director Mossman gets this with masterful subtlety—is both Odets’s astonishing ability to extract the poetry in everyday speech and the bigger picture he skillfully paints. Odets’s small-time characters are caught in a grand-scale search for meaning, with the delusion (stoked by movies and songs about “the one”) that they’ll find that meaning in romance.

Mossman’s actors live each moment as if unaware of the next, their characters clumsily bashing at their lives with a dire need to make sense of them. Tummelson exudes from her pores the yawning ache and terrible longing of a woman who realizes she doesn’t love her husband, while Miller suggests how Earl’s buffoonish mask hides the face of a drowning man desperate for someone to grab on to, even if it means dooming them both. And the innocent-seeming Ahlstrom swings chillingly between fury and abjection, unable to reconcile his wife’s betrayal with his blind, stupid love for her. The latest of Artistic Home’s resurrections of great writers’ assumed-dead works, Mossman’s razor-sharp production (a few early-run false notes aside) slices open Odets’s hard-boiled poem of the people. What’s revealed is utterly devastating.—Novid Parsi