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The Very Little Theatre continues its 79th season with a four-week run of “Awake and Sing!,” the 1935 classic by Clifford Odets.

Generally considered Clifford Odets’ finest play, Awake and Sing! was originally performed by the notable Group Theater on Broadway in 1935. By turns starkly dramatic and vividly comic, it is the story of the Bergers, a lower-middle-class, three-generation Jewish family living in a Bronx apartment during the Depression. Odets, who described his play as “a struggle for life amid petty conditions,” captures the frenetic, pressured existence in this crowded dwelling with robust authenticity.

The Berger family members and their boarder, Moe Axelrod, all 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 Depression, Odets documents their travails and their hopes, concluding Awake and Sing! on an optimistic if ambiguous note.

Awake and Sing! recalls that this country has been perceived as a source of opportunity for immigrants who re-root themselves in its cities and towns with an enduring belief in the American dream. Odets’ characters are, in essence, the parents, grandparents, and children who sought refuge and forged new, sometimes better lives here. Such families—from Korea or Mexico or Pakistan or from just about anywhere around the globe—continue to make their way to America every day, and this play offers audiences the opportunity to consider the immigration issue through the eyes of an earlier era.

Director James Aday has a strong cast for this show, including Bary Shaw as Jacob, Penta Swanson as Bessie; Steve Mandell as Myron, Zoe Grobart as Hennie, Kory Weimer as Ralph, Fred Gorelick as Morty, Patric Knight as Moe, Greg Gumbs as Sam, and Barry Carroll as Schlosser.

Reserved seat tickets are $14; Thrifty Thursday prices are $10 and senior citizens may attend any of the three Sunday matinees (January 20, 27 and Feb. 3) for $10. The thirteen performances are Friday-Sunday, Jan. 18-20; Friday-Sunday, Jan 25-27; Thursday-Sunday, Jan. 31, Feb. 1-3; and Thursday-Saturday, Feb. 7-9. Curtain is at 8 p.m. except for the 2 p.m. Sunday matinees.

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An Opening Night Gala will follow the Jan. 18 performance, with the audience invited to enjoy free refreshments with the cast in VLT’s Stage Left.

Talk-Back Sessions! Because of the interesting historical and cultural subject matter of Awake and Sing!, two performances (Thurs., Jan. 31 & Sunday, Feb. 3) will feature a Talk-Back Session following the performance, where audience members may ask questions of the cast and director.

A Study Guide prepared by director James Aday is available on this page, with more background on the play, the Depression, and the Group Theatre.

Awake and Sing! opens January 18, 2008 ; directed by James Aday

Awake and Sing! Auditions

Awake and Sing! auditions have concluded. Please see our Auditions page for upcoming auditions for other VLT shows!

Awake and Sing! Show Dates

Box Office opens Friday, January 11. Phone: (541) 344-7751.
Hours: Wed. through Sat. 2:00-5:30 PM and ONE Hour before each performance (7:00 PM, or Sunday Matinees 1:00 PM).

Awake and Sing! Cast

Awake and Sing! Production Staff

Awake and Sing! Study Guide

Talk-Back Sessions! Because of the interesting historical and cultural subject matter of Awake and Sing , two performances (Thurs., Jan. 31 & Sunday, Feb. 3) will feature a Talk-Back Session following the performance, where audience members may ask questions of the cast and director.

Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! is a play that represents a generation, a political and social movement and a group of artists at the center of its cultural expression. The Group Theatre, who premiered the play in 1935, was a theatrical community committed to an understanding of the state of the real world in which they lived. The members of the Group Theatre and the plays of Odets serve as one of the most powerful examples of the explosion of community and repertory theatres in the late 20’s and early 30’s—including the Very Little Theatre. They offered both a respite from and reflection of the economic collapse that fell upon the United States during the Great Depression. The characters Odets’ created in Awake and Sing!—and the earlier Waiting for Lefty—not only brought the common man to the forefront of American theatre, but also gave public forum for ideas of revolution, social change and class rebellion.

THE GROUP THEATRE

The Group, founded in the summer of 1931, forged an ensemble-based approach to acting and theatrical production meant to repudiate the techniques of commercial theatre acting that depended on a star system and old-fashioned business. The “method” of acting around which the Group built its ethos was an American interpretation of the teaching of Konstantin Stanislavsky. The Group pushed the system into techniques that strove to breakdown the difference between actions in life and acting on the stage: their grail was for the actor to actually feel the emotion his or her character felt in every moment of the play.

In the 1930s, the Group Theatre considered themselves to be both artistic revolutionaries and social reformers. Their method demanded that they portray real life, the troubled life of their times: its issues, its conflicts, its dreams. The Group insisted on showing the daily life of ordinary people in new plays that dared to rage against suffering and yearned to hope for a more just society. In Clifford Odets, their goals found the greatest written expression.

Realist theatre in America returns again and again to the thematics of the American Dream. Odets is no different. All of the characters in Awake and Sing! strive for their full and rightful place in the world, hoping to make things better for themselves and their family. But because Awake and Sing! is set during the Depression, those dreams are compromised, regardless of the characters actions and intentions, good or bad. Gerald M. Berkowitz writes: “Everyone is doing what they’re supposed to do, and it isn’t working. The economic collapse has changed the world so that all the old values and models for behavior — responsibility, ambition, patriotism, the American Dream — are useless or actively dangerous.”

THE GREAT DEPRESSION

The social history of the Depression confirms that anti-capitalist political movements would find fertile ground during the 1930s. Socialism in this case represents a return to the American Dream, rather than a refusal of it. Odets’ treatment of the American Dream during the Depression is at once hopeful and ironic.

After the United States Stock Market crashed in 1929, a confluence of worldwide economic crises caused the Great Depression, the deepest and most prolonged economic downturn in modern history. Widespread unemployment coupled with droughts that caused the dustbowl in Oklahoma meant that the 1930s were a decade of deprivation: food and jobs were scarce, many people found themselves homeless, living in shantytowns called Hoovervilles.

Economists and business leaders argued about how best to address the effects of the Depression. For the first part of the 1930s, non-interference was the preferred mode. But, between 1929 and 1932, the income of the average American family was reduced by 40%, from $2,300 to $1,500. Only after Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in 1932 did the United States government sponsor direct programs to combat poverty and unemployment.