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Awake and Sing!
“No law says we should be stuck together like Siamese twins!” declares Bessie Berger (Cindy Gold), the bulldog matriarch of a large Jewish family crammed in a Bronx tenement at the height of the Great Depression. Yet her actions speak otherwise: Every move Bessie makes regarding her willful daughter Hennie (Audrey Francis) and her frustrated son Ralph (Keith Gallagher) keeps them close by stomping on their individual hopes and dreams. The only aspirations allowed in this household will be for the family.
Odets’s 1935 play indicted the American obsession with material success. In the playwright’s view, Bessie’s insistence on setting up Hennie in a loveless marriage and her machinations to end Ralph’s courtship of an orphaned girl are the coldly pragmatic ends of an oppressive economic system. Bessie’s idealist, anti-capitalist father (Mike Nussbaum) is rudely dismissed by his children but makes a lasting impression on his beloved grandson.
Awake and Sing! was written for Odets’s Group Theatre ensemble but could just as easily have been meant for Morton’s. The director and her ideal cast capture the claustrophobia of the Berger household (well served by John Musial’s cramped period set) while imbuing Odets’s lightly sketched characters with deepening color. They’re also expert at mining the humor layered in with the dour; this production makes a strong case that Odets’s influences included both Marx and Chekhov in equal measures.
