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Clifford Odets July 18, 1906-August 14, 1963 Nationality: American Genre(s): Autobiographies; Plays; Film scripts Biographical and Critical Essay WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:Productions
Selected Books
Screenplays
Clifford Odets is known primarily as a proletarian playwright of the 1930s, although this label is misleading. Odets's first few plays, which catapulted him virtually overnight to fame and affluence, reflect the experience of the Great Depression and have an explicit socialist message. Beginning with Golden Boy (1937), however, Odets broadened the scope of his plays, thus drawing severe criticism for allegedly abandoning his ideological direction. Actually, this charge has little validity; an examination of Odets's plays reveals that his basic theme, the struggle of the individual to maintain his integrity, remains constant, and that it is Odets's tone which undergoes change--from militancy to moderation. Odets's own family was decidedly middle-class. He was born in Philadelphia; during his early childhood, his father Louis, a Jewish Russian immigrant, held various jobs selling newspapers and peddling salt, and his mother worked in a factory. When he was six, the family (Odets has two younger sisters) settled in the Bronx, where his father rose from a position as feeder in a printing plant to become the owner. Although Odets has said he was "a worker's son until the age of twelve," the family lived in one of the first apartment buildings in the Bronx that had an elevator, and they owned a Max-well automobile, two sure indicators of financial success. They later returned to Philadelphia, where Louis Odets became vice-president of a boiler company and owned an advertising agency, which he sold upon his retirement for two hundred thousand dollars. Despite a financially secure childhood, Odets claimed to have been "a melancholy kid," probably resulting from his stormy relationship with his father, who had plans for his son to enter his advertising business; but from an early age, Odets wanted to become an actor. Because he considered it "a waste of time," he dropped out of Morris High School in 1923 after two years and tried to write poetry. Odets recalled in an interview that on one occasion his father, furious with his son's rebelliousness, smashed his typewriter. Later, of course, his father replaced it, and eventually gave his permission for Odets to attempt a career on the stage. Odets had, during the next seven years, a series of minor jobs in the theatrical world. He acted with the Drawing-Room Players, a neighborhood company which presented one-act plays in the Heckscher Theatre, and with Harry Kemp's Poet's Theatre. He also worked as an announcer for a small radio station in the Bronx, wrote radio plays, gave performances as a roving reciter specializing in the poems of Rudyard Kipling, and played in vaudeville for a dollar a night. At the age of twenty, he was hired as a juvenile in Mae Desmond's Stock Company, which performed primarily melodrama, but he apparently was not particularly talented as an actor. His first association with the Broadway stage came in 1929 when he was hired as understudy to Spencer Tracy in Warren F. Lawrence's Conflict. A member of the cast introduced Odets to the Theatre Guild, which led him to join the Group Theatre in 1930. This event marked the actual beginning of Odets's career. The ten-year history of the Group Theatre has been chronicled in Harold Clurman's The Fervent Years (1975). It was an organization of actors and directors founded by Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford as a collective theatre, a group of individuals whose plays would reflect their values and attempt to change the society of which they were a part. Ideally, the Group Theatre would be a training ground for actors, in which a unified method (closely modeled on the theories of the Russian theatrical director, teacher, and actor, Konstantin Stanislavsky) would be used by the directors to mold the actors into a single organism; because the production itself was most important, there would be no "stars." Although the Group Theatre occasionally failed to live up to its ideals and was periodically plagued by internal disputes, it was vigorously applauded by critics and has had a lasting impact on the American theatre. There is no question that it had an overwhelming influence on Odets; in 1936 he remarked, "I don't think I would ever have written a play if it hadn't been for the Group." He joined the Group Theatre as an actor and played a few minor roles in plays such as Paul Green's The House of Connelly (1931) and Sidney Kingsley's Men in White (1933). Scarcely noticed by reviewers and increasingly frustrated over his floundering career, Odets began to write a play about Beethoven. The following year he wrote in his diary: "Here I am writing the Beethoven play, which when it is finished may not even be about Beethoven. Why not write something about the Greenberg family, something I know better, something that is closer to me?" Apparently this idea inspired Odets to work on the play which later became Awake and Sing! (1935). Meanwhile, as the Depression continued and Odets found it increasingly difficult to survive (he lived with several other members of the Group Theatre in a large, poorly heated apartment), he sought the solution to the problems of the suffering masses in the Communist Party, which he joined in 1934 and left after eight months. In 1952, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Odets explained his feelings during the 1930s: "Literature was passed around, and in a time of great social unrest many people found themselves reaching out for new ideas, new ways of solving depressions or making a better living, fighting for one's rights. . . . The rights to be steadily employed, for instance. I believe at that time there were perhaps fifteen or sixteen million unemployed people in the United States, and I myself was living on ten cents a day. . . . They were horrendous days that none of us would like to go through again. . . . [I] finally joined the Communist Party, in the belief, in the honest and real belief, that this was some way out of the dilemma in which we found ourselves." Written during his association with the Communist Party, Waiting for Lefty (1935), Odets's first produced play, has been called "the definitive specimen of the whole proletarian drama in America." It was inspired by the New York taxi strike of February 1934, although Odets claimed that when the play was written, he had "never been near a strike." He wrote the play for the New Theatre League, which was seeking plays for workers that might be presented in any meeting place or hall. Clurman reports that the first performance of Waiting for Lefty, a Sunday benefit performance for the New Theater Magazine on 5 January 1935 at the Civic Repertory Theatre in New York, was a significant moment in the history of the American theatre: "When the audience at the end of the play responded to the militant question from the stage: `Well, what's the answer?' with a spontaneous roar of 'Strike! Strike!' it was something more than a tribute to the play's effectiveness, more even than a testimony of the audience's hunger for constructive social action. It was the birth cry of the thirties. Our youth had found its voice." Today's readers may be somewhat mystified as to what all the excitement was about; Waiting for Lefty seems simplistic--its message is heavy-handed, and its characters are shallow stereotypes. Yet the play does have its merits and is frequently touching. Malcolm Cowley says in The Dream of the Golden Mountain (1980), "Lefty, for all its faults, comes as close to being classic as anything that directly emerged from the proletarian school." Odets structured the play as a series of brief vignettes, each of which spotlights certain individuals and shows how their problems reflect the larger conflict which forms the framework of the play. (Odets rearranged and substituted scenes after the original production; the version included in Six Plays of Clifford Odets , 1939, will be discussed here.) The play opens with the "Union Assembly Hall Scene," in which Harry Fatt, a union organizer, is attempting to dissuade the members of the taxi drivers' union from striking. The play is staged so that the theatre becomes the union assembly hall, with the union officials sitting facing the audience and actors playing union members planted in the audience. It quickly becomes obvious that the taxi drivers are eager to strike and are awaiting the arrival of Lefty Costello, a leader who will support them. One man, Joe, speaks out, shouting that the country is "on the blink," and he comes onstage to argue in favor of a strike. As he does so, the lighting changes as the second scene, "Joe and Edna," begins, showing Joe at home having a confrontation with his wife. Because Joe brings home only six or seven dollars a week, scarcely enough to support the family, Edna demands that he do something to improve their life and threatens to leave him. Edna knows nothing about politics, but she recognizes the inequities of the economic system which permits the capitalist to become wealthy while the worker's children go hungry, and she bitterly attacks Joe for allowing the situation to become critical. Joe is finally stung into action, and the scene shifts back to the union hall, where he says, "We gotta walk out!" Next to be spotlighted is Miller in "Laboratory Assistant," who now drives a taxi because he was fired from his previous job as research assistant when he refused to compromise his ideals. The scene shows him being offered a promotion by Fayette, a capitalist manufacturer of poison gas; his new position will require him to spy on his co-worker, a respected chemist. Finally Miller realizes that what Fayette is offering is harmful to mankind as well as degrading, and, in a rage, he strikes him. The next scene, "The Young Hack and His Girl," depicts two young people, Sid and Florrie, who want to get married but are forced to separate because Florrie's brother will not allow her to marry a poor taxi driver. In "The Labor Spy Episode," the focus shifts back to the union meeting, where a labor spy, Clayton, is exposed by one of the taxi drivers in the audience, who turns out to be his own brother. In "The Interne" scene which follows, Dr. Benjamin, a Jew, has been asked to resign from the hospital staff. His friend, Dr.Barnes, hints that anti-Semitism might be the motive. Furthermore, an incompetent physician, who is the nephew of a senator, will be replacing him. Dr. Benjamin muses that perhaps he will go to Russia to live but decides that his work is here in America, and he takes a job driving a cab. The final scene in the play is "The Agate Episode," in which Agate Keller takes the floor to urge the members not to wait for Lefty but to strike now. His speech is impassioned, and when a man comes in to announce that Lefty has been found shot to death, the men rise to their feet in a unified call to "Strike!" Harold Clurman remembers that when the Group Theatre members first read Waiting for Lefty, they were "struck by its originality and fire," and Joseph Wood Krutch in the Literary History of the United States (1963) calls the play "ingenious and forthright." It was an immediate success when it opened on Broadway, and by July of 1935 it had been produced in thirty cities across the country. Although the play was acclaimed primarily as a political statement, one can argue that beyond the issue of the taxi strike, Waiting for Lefty asserts the right of every individual to have his share of human dignity. The villain in the play is not just capitalism, but any system or set of values which strips a man of his self-worth and destroys personal relationships. Michael J. Mendelsohn further suggests that Waiting for Lefty shows a skill in technique and imagination that is unusual in a first play and has an artistry not found in the other proletarian plays of the 1930s. Unfortunately, Odets's name has been irrevocably linked with Waiting for Lefty, while many of his better plays are often overlooked. Certainly Awake and Sing!, which was actually written prior to Waiting for Lefty but not produced by the Group Theatre until the latter was already a hit, is a more lasting contribution to the American theatre. Awake and Sing! takes its title from Isaiah 26: 19--"Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust." According to the list of characters, "all of the characters in Awake and Sing! share a fundamental activity: a struggle for life amidst petty conditions." Like Waiting for Lefty , the play condemns the economic system which traps individuals into a treadmill of hopelessness. It is not, however, an angry diatribe. Instead, it is a full-length, three-act play which examines the relationships, ambitions, and frustrations of the members of a struggling Jewish working-class family, the Bergers. The plot centers on the efforts of the youngest members of the family to escape their environment. Ralph, the son, a romantic and naive dreamer, works as a clerk and complains that all he wants is "a chance to get to first base." Hennie, the beautiful, self-reliant daughter, has several admirers, including Schlosser, the janitor, whose wife ran off and left him with a young child, and Moe Axelrod, a boarder in the Berger household, who lost a leg in the war and is now a petty racketeer. Their father, Myron, is a "born follower" who has known nothing but failure yet never admits defeat and continues to live in the past. Their mother, Bessie, is a strong-willed, domineering woman whose motivation is to preserve the respectability of her family; she forces the pregnant Hennie to marry Sam Feinschreiber, a lonely, sensitive man who is deluded into thinking that the baby is his. Ralph is appalled when he discovers what his mother has done and is shocked to learn that his grandfather, Jacob, a Marxist idealist, did nothing to prevent it. The family circle is completed by Uncle Morty, a shrewd, cynical businessman and sensualist who personifies economic success. By the end of the play, Ralph and Hennie achieve some sort of escape. Hennie leaves her husband and child and runs off to Cuba with Moe Axelrod. Ralph becomes spiritually reborn when Jacob, who is not a man of action, names Ralph as beneficiary of his insurance policy and commits suicide, after giving him the advice which he himself was never able to follow: "This . . . I tell you--Do! Do what is in your heart and carry in yourself a revolution. But you should act. Not like me. A man who had golden opportunities but drank instead a glass tea." The play ends on a positive note with Ralph's affirmative speech: "I'm twenty-two and kickin! I'll get along. Did Jake die for us to fight about nickles? No! 'Awake and sing,' he said. Right here he stood and said it. The night he died, I saw it like a thunderbolt! I saw he was dead and I was born! I swear to God, I'm one week old! I want the whole city to hear it--fresh blood, arms. We got'em. We're glad we're living." Clearly, the theory of economic determinism underlies Awake and Sing! There is no villain in the play except the economic system; the characters have all been gravely affected by their financial circumstances. Moe and Morty, who have achieved success as capitalists, are crippled, one physically, the other spiritually. The remaining characters are victimized by capitalism. Bessie and Myron are, in the words of Michael Mendelsohn, "chained to their own bourgeois attitudes and slogans, leading a hopelessly false life." Presumably Hennie and Ralph will ultimately be like their parents unless they make the individual effort to escape, and Odets believes that they have indeed broken the cycle. However, the ending of the play has drawn considerable criticism. Hennie's flight is undeniably irresponsible, and her destination, Havana, is highly suspicious. In 1935, Cuba was ruled by the Mendieta dictatorship, and Gerald Weales has pointed out that the Cuban Tourist Commission resorted to advertisements in American newspapers to assure potential tourists that they would be safe in Cuba. Moe, with his false values, is an unlikely hero; to him, "it's all a racket--from horse racing on down. Marriage, politics, big business--everybody plays cops and robbers." Additionally, Ralph's alleged transformation does not truly indicate that his life will be any different in the future. The audience is merely told Ralph has changed. His final speech is impassioned and seems full of conviction, but there is no proof that Ralph is now capable of action, nor is there any concrete suggestion of what he will do to improve his situation. Indeed, in the third act he is still incapable of dealing decisively with his girl friend, Blanche. Odets, however, did not intend the ending of Awake and Sing! to be ambiguous; he repeatedly emphasized in interviews the optimistic nature of the play. Despite this flaw, the play is remarkable for its power, realism, and brilliant dialogue. Edward Murray believes that "few works in American drama reveal so well what happens to a family when natural relations are perverted." Odets's third play is more explicitly political than Awake and Sing! When the hour-long Waiting for Lefty was brought to Broadway by the Group Theatre, a companion play was needed. For this purpose, Odets wrote Till the Day I Die (1935), a play in seven scenes inspired by a letter Odets had read in New Masses , which described the torture and breakdown of a German underground worker by the Nazis. Although it was the first successful anti-Nazi play to appear in New York, Till the Day I Die is considered the slightest of Odets's plays; its relatively long run was due to the popularity of Waiting for Lefty . It tells the story of Ernst Tausig, a Communist worker who is arrested by the Nazis and tortured. Even though they smash his hands (he is a violinist), he refuses to divulge any information, so the Nazis release him, intending to use him as a decoy to capture other members of the underground. He is reunited briefly with Carl, his brother, and Tilly, his common-law wife who is pregnant with his child, and he tries to tell them how the Nazis plan to use him. At a meeting, Ernst's fellow workers decide to blacklist him after hearing the charges against him: he had accompanied the Nazis on raids, he was seen standing at the door as prisoners were taken in for interrogation, he was wearing new clothes--all ploys by the Nazis to make him appear to be a traitor. In the final scene, Ernst returns to Carl and Tilly, a broken and sick man, in an effort to clear his name. He begs Carl to kill him: "Take the gun. Carl, you loved me once. Kill me. One day more and I'll stand there like an idiot identifying prisoners for them." When Carl refuses, Ernst walks offstage, saying, "Do your work, comrades." The play ends with Ernst's suicide: TILLY (for a moment stands still, then starts for room, Carl stops her): Carl, stop him, stop him. (Carl holds her back.) CARL: Let him die .... TILLY: Carl .... (Shot heard within.) CARL: Let him live ....Till the Day I Die is clearly a propaganda play intended to alert audiences to the horrors of Nazism and the need to combat it. Unfortunately, it is not particularly convincing, due to its lack of verisimilitude, the sentimentalization of its characters, and some political misconceptions. The central character, Ernst, is never developed beyond the stereotype of the noble resister; as Gerald Weales suggests, the play focuses less on what he does (until the final suicide) than on what is done to him. In addition, the play proposes that the proper weapon against Nazism is Communism, a notion which was shown to be false, particularly after the signing of the Berlin-Moscow pact in 1939. Till the Day I Die was the last of Odets's plays to deal explicitly with a particular political problem.
Paradise Lost, Odets's fourth play produced during 1935, takes a more indirect approach. Although Odets wrote in the preface to Six Plays that it was his favorite of the early plays, it was not well received; it was probably not understood by the critics who were expecting a realistic play similar to Waiting for Lefty, Till the Day I Die, and Awake and Sing! The play has often been called Chekhovian, because Odets himself mentioned Chekhov in a publicity release. However, he later denied that the play was influenced by a reading of Chekhov, and R. Baird Shuman suggests that it may be more readily compared with the plays of Sean O'Casey. Paradise Lost has also been likened unfavorably to Awake and Sing!; Joseph Wood Krutch, for example, wrote that the play "seems like nothing so much as an improbable burlesque of Awake and Sing!" However, Odets intended for the audience to consider the symbolic meaning of what is on the surface a realistic play. As he explained,the hero of the play is "the entire American middle class of liberal tendency." Each of the members of the Gordon household represents a middle-class value, and the steady decline within the play symbolizes the decay of these false values during the 1930s. Shuman explains that "Odets is not for a moment trying to imply that only a family is destroyed; indeed, a huge segment of society is being swallowed up--morally, economically, spiritually--in one of the most pervasive social upheavals to occur in the United States during its history. The author is concerned in Paradise Lost with this all-encompassing social situation which he portrays microcosmically through one very limited group of characters." The head of the household, Leo Gordon, a small businessman who designs handbags, represents the best middle-class characteristics; he is artistic, intellectual, and compassionate. Clara, his wife, has found fulfillment in her three children. The children each embody a virtue: Ben is a former Olympic hero, Julie is a bank clerk with great prospects for financial success, and Pearl is a classical pianist. Other characters in the play include Leo's friend Gus Michaels, whose small business has failed, leaving him little to do but collect stamps; Gus's daughter, Libby, who marries Ben; Sam Katz, Leo's unscrupulous business partner; Sam's wife, Bertha, disappointed by her inability to have children; Kewpie, a petty gangster and friend of Ben's; and Mr. Pike, a former itinerant worker, now a furnace man, who represents America's pioneer stock but utters Marxist ideals. In the course of the play, the Gordons experience one catastrophe after another. A shop delegation from Leo Gordon's business complains that the workers are being denied a decent living wage, a condition which Leo had not been aware of because he left the running of the factory to Sam, who is revealed to be an embezzler. Despite Sam's protestations that raising wages would result in financial ruin, Leo agrees to the delegation's demands, and the business eventually goes bankrupt. The older son, Ben, has a weak heart and, notwithstanding vague promises from his friends and acquaintances, is unable to find employment and earn a living for his family until Kewpie invites him to participate in a robbery, where he is killed by the police. The second son, Julie, has made a fortune on paper, but he is incurably ill with encephalitis. The daughter, Pearl, loses her lover, Felix, because he is unable to find employment as a violinist and must go to another city to get a job; as a result, Pearl completely withdraws from the world and spends her lonely days playing her piano. Act 3 finds the Gordons about to be evicted, having lost their business and their house. The play ends, however, in typical Odetsian fashion with a final impassioned speech. Leo, undefeated by all of his losses, bursts forth with a vision of optimism for the future: "That was the past, but there is a future. Now we know. We dare to understand. Truly, truly, the past was a dream. But this is real! To know from this that something must be done. That is real. We searched; we were confused! But we searched, and now the search is ended. For the truth has found us .... Oh, yes, I tell you the whole world is for men to possess. Heartbreak and terror are not the heritage of mankind! The world is beautiful. No fruit tree wears a lock and key. Men will sing at their work, men will love. Ohhh, darling, the world is in its morning ... and no man fights alone!" Critics were particularly harsh in their comments about this speech. It is the same problem of Ralph's final speech in Awake and Sing! all over again, only this time there is even less internal evidence to support Leo's conversion. Clara Bagley, in her review in Worker, remarked that the only apparent reason for Leo's speech is that "it is eleven o'clock and the curtain must come down." Paradise Lost was a commercial failure, and it marked the end of the first phase of Odets's career as a playwright. During 1935 Odets remained concerned with the sufferings of the downtrodden and oppressed, despite the success which transformed him into a celebrity. In fact, that summer he led a commission to Cuba to verify reports that the Mendieta regime had suspended civil liberties in that country. On their arrival in Havana, the members of the commission were arrested and forced to return to the United States. After lodging a protest with the Cuban Consul General, the commission published a pamphlet, Rifle Rule in Cuba , and Odets began a play (which he never finished) which was intended to bring the incident to the attention of the public. At the same time, however, as a successful writer, Odets began to receive offers from Hollywood, starting with $500 a week after the opening of Waiting for Lefty and apparently going as high as $4000 a week when Awake and Sing! was established as a hit. To Odets, Hollywood represented "sin" and a desertion of the values held by the Group Theatre. However, with the failure of Paradise Lost, Odets accepted an offer of $2500 a week from Paramount, rationalizing his decision on the grounds that he could help the Group Theatre by sending it money, which he did. His first Hollywood effort was the screenplay The General Died at Dawn (1936), a melodrama with some minor political overtones. When the movie was released, reviewer Frank S. Nugent titled his review, "Odets, Where Is Thy Sting?"; the New York critics generally agreed that Odets's career as a playwright was over and that he had sold out to Hollywood. They were proven wrong; after an interlude in Hollywood, during which he wrote two other screenplays ("Gettysburg," which was never filmed, and "Castles in Spain," which was rewritten and produced as Blockade in 1938) and married Luise Rainer, Odets returned to New York, where he worked with the Group Theatre until 1941. Odets wrote Golden Boy for the GroupTheatre and subsidized the cost of the production, and the play rescued the Group Theatre from a severe financial crisis. It was the greatest commercial success of Odets's career, and the movie rights were eventually sold for $75,000. Golden Boy also ushered in a new period in Odets's career. As Shuman suggests, "It is much broader in scope than the earlier plays, and shows clearly that the author is unwilling to remain ideologically static and produce political propaganda for the remainder of his life. His concern is for man and the forces which dictate human destiny." According to Harold Clurman, Golden Boy is the most subjective of Odets's plays, reflecting the compromise Odets made by going to Hollywood. To a certain extent, this is true. The hero of the play is Joe Bonaparte, the son of an Italian fruit vendor, who decides to forsake a potential career as a concert violinist in order to become a successful prizefighter. In the course of his rise to the top, Joe unintentionally kills the former champion during a bout. When this happens, he realizes what he has sacrificed for success, and the play ends with his death in an automobile accident. Gerald Weales suggests that Golden Boy is a variation on the Faust theme, "the story of a young man who sells his soul (goes against his nature) and discovers, too late, that he has made a bad bargain." The other characters and the symbolic elements in the play serve to reinforce this thesis. Joe's family represents genuine values. His father, who has saved for a lifetime to buy Joe an expensive violin, believes in self-fulfillment; he is Odets's spokesman when he says, "Whatever you got ina your nature to do isa not foolish!" Joe's sister Anna and her husband Siggie have a marriage based on love and mutual respect. His brother Frank is a representative of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a conscientious man whose life is dedicated to the betterment of society. Yet Joe rejects his family when he gives up the violin for boxing gloves and enters the world of commercial success. There he is treated like a commodity by individuals like Tom Moody, his manager, who exploits him in order to obtain financial security so he can divorce his wife and marry Lorna, his girl friend and secretary; and by Eddie Fuseli, a racketeer who "buys a piece" of him. Joe himself is a sensitive introvert who becomes a boxer in order to achieve financial success and to revenge past insults resulting from his odd name and his optical deformity (he is "cock-eyed," symbolizing his inability to focus clearly on what is important to him). After he breaks his hands during a fight at the end of the second act, which means he can no longer play the violin and which symbolizes his complete break with his former values, he exults, "Hallalujah! It's the beginning of the world!" He buys a Deusenberg automobile, a symbol of materialism and speed, and thinks he has found love in Lorna. But the death of his opponent, the Chocolate Drop, brings him to the realization that he has actually destroyed himself. Odets does not specify whether or not the fatal accident at the end of the play is a suicide. It does not matter. As Weales suggests, "even if it is an accident, it is no accident." Even before Golden Boy was produced, Odets had been working on a play entitled The Silent Partner , which focussed on the shift of power from bosses to workers in a factory town during the Depression and which he claimed would be the best labor play ever produced. However, the play is very similar to Waiting for Lefty, and it was not performed during his lifetime. (On 11 May 1972, The Silent Partner was produced by Actors Studio in a limited engagement as a special showcase production that included both readings and staged portions of the play.) Over the next four years, Odets wrote three plays dealing with relationships between men and women. It is likely that this preoccupation stemmed from his own marital problems (he was divorced from Luise Rainer in 1941). When the first of these, Rocket to the Moon, opened in 1938, Odets defended himself against charges that the play lacked substance by saying that "the roots of love and the meaning of it in the present world need surely to be comprehended as much as the effect of a strike on its activists." According to Clurman, the theme of Rocket to the Moon is the "difficult quest for love in the modern world." The three pivotal characters form a conventional triangle, but the underlying assumption of the play is that society is responsible for the predicament they are in. Ben Stark is a rather timid, middle-aged dentist who is frustrated with his marriage and his dental practice. His wife, Belle, a domineering shrew whose only pregnancy ended with a stillborn child, will not permit him to risk his secure business by moving to a new location and disapproves of his pretty young secretary, Cleo, a naive and romantic girl who is seeking love and excitement. The inevitable affair between Stark and Cleo develops and is complicated by two other men who also vie for Cleo's attentions--Mr. Prince, Belle's suave widower father, whose marriage was unhappy, and Willy Wax, a Broadway director and a ladies' man. To Cleo, the three men represent respectively passion, security, and glamour; at the end of the play, she rejects all three and leaves to seek "a whole full world, with all the trimmings." As for Stark, he seems to have reached a higher level of self-awareness, as his closing lines indicate: "For years I sat here, taking things for granted, my wife, everything. Then just for an hour my life was in a spotlight .... I saw everything clearly, realized who and what I was. Isn't that a beginning? Isn't it?" The element of economic determinism is underscored in the play by two minor characters. Phil Cooper, a dentist who shares offices with Stark, represents the professional man whose career and personal happiness are ruined by the Depression; he complains, "Who's got time to think about women! I'm trying to make a living!" Frenchy, a chiropodist, philosophizes on the conflict of the work ethic and the love ethic: FRENCHY: ... Love is no solution of life! Au contraire, as the Frenchman says--the opposite. You have to bring a whole balanced normal life to love if you want it to go! STARK: Yes, I see your point. FRENCHY: In this day of stress I don't see much normal life ....This viewpoint has been apparent, to a greater or lesser degree, in all of Odets's plays--from Joe and Edna in Waiting for Lefty to Joe and Lorna in Golden Boy; in this sense, Rocket to the Moon is not really the departure from social criticism that reviewers complained it is. It does, however, have its weaknesses, primarily in the characterizations of Stark and Cleo. Stark is simply too insignificant to be seen as heroic, and Cleo is regarded by many as silly and childish. Furthermore, the failure of the Starks' marriage seems to be due as much to their emotional weaknesses as to the Depression, thus undermining the ideological foundation of the play. However, the play does successfully depict what Weales terms a spiritual dislocation in which no one dares risk anything. The title itself refers to taking chances; Mr. Prince says to Stark, "Why don't you suddenly ride away, an airplane, a boat! Take a rocket to the moon! Explode!" Stark and Cleo are able to do this, and presumably their lives are better for it.
Odets's next play, Night Music, which was produced in 1940, also has a conventional "boy meets girl plot." Clurman, in his introduction, writes "The play stems from the basic sentiment that people nowadays are affected by a sense of insecurity; they are haunted by the fear of permanence in all their relationships; they are fundamentally homeless, and, whether or not they know it, they are in search of a home, of something real, secure, dependable in a slippery, shadowy, noisy and nervous world." The play's action begins on a Saturday evening in Manhattan when the brash, wisecracking hero, Steve Takis, who is transporting two monkeys to California as part of his job with a movie studio, accidentally meets Fay Tucker, a struggling young actress. The monkeys frighten Fay, and Steve is arrested. The two young people spend the weekend together, Steve provoking quarrels most of the time because of a series of accidents (Steve has lost his wallet; the play in which Fay was acting has closed). When Fay's father and her fiance, both of whom represent middle-class complacency and narrow-mindedness, arrive to take Fay home with them, she rejects their kind of life, and by Monday, the end of the play, Steve and Fay have fallen in love. Acting as a sort of guardian angel for the young couple is Abraham Lincoln Rosenberger, a detective who is dying of cancer, but who symbolizes life lived to the fullest ("I am in love with the possibilities, the human possibilities," he says). Several minor characters Steve encounters are also homeless: a sailor, a beggar, a sleeping man, a drunk, and a whore. In Night Music, Odets deliberately experimented with structure, music, and setting. Joseph Wood Krutch in his review calls the structure of the play "centripetal"; Edward Murray believes it is more accurately "centrifugal." Steve is the center of the structure, and the action proceeds outward from this center. Murray suggests that Steve may be viewed as the hub of a wheel with all of the other characters revolving around him, the resulting movement conveying the theme of homelessness. In addition, the play includes incidental music composed by Hanns Eisler. Weales notes that Night Music is "unusual in its attempt to present a total theater experience in which text, performance, music and sets worked together to convey a prevailing mood." Apparently music and slide projections were employed primarily to sustain the mood during the scene changes. Setting is more significant in this play than in previous Odets plays. Each of the eight settings (a police station, a stagedoor exit, the lobby of the Hotel Algiers, adjoining hotel rooms, Central Park, a restaurant, the World's Fair, and the airport) is a public place, reemphasizing the theme of homelessness. Despite Odets's attempts to provide the play with unity, the reviewers were unanimous in their criticism of its structure. Shuman notes that the concentrated action does not result in a "heightened intensity" but instead suggests that Fay and Steve's relationship is merely superficial. In addition, Steve's basic problem is private, not public. Edward Murray notes that Steve's homelessness stems from a search for a lost mother, not from poverty. Fay's search, likewise, has a psychological foundation; she is suffering from an existential malaise. Night Music closed after a brief run, probably because, as Shuman suggests, it bewildered rather than enlightened audiences. Odets, according to Clurman, assumed wrongly that we all "recognize our homelessness, that we all believe the rootlessness and disorientation of his hero to be typical, that we all know that most of the slogans of our society are without substance in terms of our true emotions." The play was revived briefly in 1951; critics discussing the play then and in more recent years have had increasingly positive things to say about it. Michael J. Mendelsohn believes it is Odets's most underrated play, and Weales says it is one of Odets's plays for which he has the greatest affection. Yet it has never been successful as a theatre piece. The third of Odets's plays to deal with love relationships is Clash by Night, which premiered in 1941; it also suffers from a blurring of psychological and sociological motive. Like Rocket to the Moon, the play presents a triangle, but its characters are less sympathetic, and the violent ending makes the play pessimistic. Although Odets attempted to build an ideological base into his play, the banality of the plot reduces it to a depressing melodrama. Using Matthew Arnold 's poem "Dover Beach" (1867) as a point of reference, Odets attempts to show that modern life is indeed a confused struggle on "a darkling plain," "Where ignorant armies clash by night," and that the prevailing concept of love is false and artificial and will not provide any real alternative to the loss of meaning in life. The subplot in Clash by Night shows a pair of young lovers, Joe and Peggy, prevented from marrying by financial hardships, who finally decide to marry in the last act; Joe makes a concluding affirmative speech, ending with "it's time to love and face the future!" However, the subplot is not well integrated into the play (Clurman says it "represented a kind of ideological afterthought") and is negated by the hopelessness of the ending. The characters in Clash by Night are members of the lower-middle class living on Staten Island. Mae Wilenski, thirty, is a bored, lonely housewife with a seven-week-old baby. Her husband, Jerry, is a somewhat stupid but good-natured carpenter. His father, a Polish immigrant who lives with the couple, is afraid that he will be deported back to Poland because he has never learned to read, so he is constantly pretending to read the newspaper; he is a pathetic figure of loneliness and social disorientation. In act 1, Jerry invites his friend Earl to board with them, and Earl eventually becomes Mae's lover; at the end of the play, Jerry murders Earl. Beyond this, there is very little action in Clash by Night, but Odets has built symbolic elements into the play which are intended to clarify the thesis that American society is on the brink of disaster, that the working class, lulled into a false sense of well-being by the trappings of popular culture, is actually baffled, discontented, and full of repressed violence--ripe for fascism. For example, Mae hums songs like "The Sheik of Araby" and "Avalon" (popular escapist songs) and says she enjoys going to the movies, Earl works as a projectionist in a movie theatre, and the murder takes place in a projection booth while a typically frivolous movie is playing. Also, the character of Vince, Jerry's uncle, is intended to represent fascism. He is a despicable villain who goads Jerry into violence. In Joe's affirmative final speech, he predicts that the next step after disillusionment is fascism: "I see what happens when we wait for Paradise. Tricky Otto comes along, with a forelock and a mustache. Then he tells them why they're blue. `You've been wronged,' he says. `They done you dirt. Now come along with me. Take orders, park your brains, don't think, don't worry; poppa tucks you in at night!' ... And where does that end? In violence, destruction, cripples by the carload!" The difficulty with the play is that although these symbolic elements are present, they are not obvious; what is obvious is that Mae and Jerry are crippled by their emotional problems. Mae's discontent seems to stem largely from her comparing Jerry with her former lover, a "big, comfortable" politician who gave her "confidence." Murray suggests that Mae might be searching for a father surrogate, in which case it is doubtful that she would be content with any man. As far as Jerry is concerned, he is infantile in his behavior and has a clear mother fixation; when he learns what has developed between his wife and Earl, he says, "I can go sleep in poppa's room, if you don't wanna talk to me, momma--I mean, Mae," and the scene ends with his picking up a teddy bear which cries out, "Momma, momma." Any connection between these psychological factors and the larger social environment is unexplained by Odets. Weales suggests that Odets is wrong to consider popular culture to be the cause of a widespread social problem; if anything, it is a symptom. That audiences did not accept Odets's premise and that they assumed the tragedy had private rather than public causes is obvious from the fact that when the play opened--twenty days after the attack on Pearl Harbor and sixteen days after Nazi Germany declared war on the United States--the reviewers scarcely mentioned the political implications and dismissed the play as a sordid triangle. The failure of Clash by Night marked the end of the second phase of Odets's career. Although he was well established as an important playwright by the end of 1941 (Random House had published Six Plays of Clifford Odets in 1939), he was at a crossroads: his marriage ended in divorce, and the Group Theatre, plagued by internal dissension, disbanded. (Clash by Night had begun as a Group Theatre production, but finally was produced by Billy Rose.) After contributing to the war effort by writing an adaptation of Konstantin Simonov's The Russians (a patriotic melodrama, extolling the heroism of the Russian people, immensely popular in Moscow, but not well received in New York) which was produced in December 1942 by the Theatre Guild as The Russian People, Odets returned to Hollywood. During the next few years, he wrote three screenplays: None But the Lonely Heart (1944), which he also directed; Humoresque (1946); and Deadline at Dawn (1946); plus a number of scripts which were never produced. He married Bette Grayson in 1943. Although Odets was well paid (on 2 March 1949, Variety reported that his income during his last year in Hollywood ran into six figures), he apparently had a great distaste for the work he was doing, saying, "I took my filthy salary every week and rolled an inner eye around an inner landscape." His attitude toward Hollywood remained ambivalent; he tried to convince himself that he could work for the betterment of humanity through the medium of cinema, but his scripts never reached a high level of achievement. Stefan Kanfer,in A Journal of the Plague Years (1973), suggests that Odets was always uncomfortable in Hollywood and never forgave himself for submitting to the lure of the high salary. Nevertheless he adopted the Hollywood life-style. Kanfer relates that on one occasion, when Odets was still married to Luise Rainer, he became angry when she gave her staff a night off and served the guests herself. "In Hollywood, one has servants," he told her. "Otherwise why come here?" He returned to New York for the production of The Big Knife, written in 1948 and produced in 1949, which was interpreted by critics as a direct attack on Hollywood. The Big Knife is the story of Charlie Castles, a highly successful movie actor, who has been offered a four-million-dollar, fourteen-year contract by Marcus Hoff, a motion-picture tycoon. Charlie does not want to sign the contract. Feeling that he has lost his integrity by acting in cheap films, he wishes to return to the New York stage; his wife, Marion, who is now living apart from him, threatens to divorce him if he does sign. The situation is complicated by the fact that, several years earlier, Charlie had killed a child in a hit-and-run accident for which his friend Buddy Bliss had taken the blame and served a prison term. Now Marcus Hoff is threatening to make the truth known if Charlie refuses to sign the contract. Out of fear, Charlie agrees to sign, but once he does so, he realizes that he has sold his self-respect. When he learns of the studio plot to murder Dixie Evans, the starlet who was in the car with him the night of the accident, to prevent her from talking, Charlie comes to a full awareness of what his "success" means and commits suicide. Odets claimed that the play was more than an indictment of Hollywood: "This is an objective play about thousands of people, I don't care what industry they're in .... I have nothing against Hollywood per se. The big knife is that force which seeks to cut people off in their best flower." Yet most reviews, like that in the Daily Mirror, complained that, "after spending seven years in Hollywood turning out movie scripts at fancy wages, Clifford Odets has returned to Broadway to belabor the source of his handsome income." Apparently Hollywood held a different opinion, and a successful film version of The Big Knife was produced in 1955. There are obvious similarities between The Big Knife and Golden Boy: both heroes choose materialism over idealism and end in suicide. However, the character of Charlie Castles is more complex that that of Joe Bonaparte. Joe soon realizes that material success will not make him happy, but Charlie is a man who "at once both loves and hates his success," according to Weales. Joe's accidental killing of the former champion is the critical moment of his life, but Charlie is able to live with the death of the little girl on his conscience; he can even sleep with Buddy's wife while Buddy is in jail for him. He only stops short of deliberate murder. At one point in the play, Charlie says, "Macbeth is an allegory, too: one by one, he kills his better selves." Apparently Odets had Macbeth in mind when he was writing The Big Knife, and in an interview he referred to Dixie Evans as "Banquo's ghost." It is possible to view Charlie Castles's depraved environment as an equivalent of the moral squalor of Macbeth's witches, which pressures Charlie to yield to his darkest yearnings. To Murray, Charlie Castles is "the most tormented character Odets ever created ..., sickened by compromise and driven to self-destruction in an effort to expiate his sins." Therefore, to view The Big Knife as simply an attack on the values of Hollywood is to disregard the fact that Charlie Castles's problems result from flaws in his character as well as the corrupting influences of society. Two other attributes of The Big Knife should also be mentioned. First, the language in an Odets play is usually a strong point, and this play is no exception. The critics praised the verbal power of the dialogue; Kappo Phelan, for example, admired the play's "astonishing rhetoric." Secondly, the minor characters in the play are remarkable; Weales believes that "theatrically, they are the best thing in the play." Marcus Hoff is the stereotype of the oily villain, but his habit of uttering convoluted speech makes him especially memorable. Smiley Coy, Hoff's factotum, personifies cruelty camouflaged by friendliness. Nat Danziger, Charlie's agent, is paradoxical; although he seems to be a good man, of the same mold as Joe Bonaparte's father, he advises Charlie to sign the contract--and he stands to gain a considerable amount of money if Charlie does so. Odets's incisive portrait of Patty Benedict, the gossip columnist, may have been modeled on Hedda Hopper. Odets's next play, The Country Girl (1950), also has an actor as its hero, but it is entirely a psychological study--it is the one Odets play which clearly does not have a "message" in the political sense. After Golden Boy, it is Odets's most commercially successful play, with its 235 performances, although he claims that he wrote it for money and never cared for it. In the play, Bernie Dodd, an enthusiastic young director, offers Frank Elgin, an aging alcoholic actor, a leading role in a Broadway play. Lacking confidence in himself, Frank is reluctant to accept. His wife, Georgie, is about to leave him, but decides to stay when he assumes responsibility for himself and takes the part. At first, primarily because of the lies that Frank has told him, Bernie thinks that Georgie's severe emotional problems would be a hindrance to Frank's comeback. Then, when Frank crumbles under the pressure of his role and gets drunk, Bernie realizes that actually Frank is dependent on Georgie, and not the other way around. Bernie and Georgie have a brief romance and work together to help Frank, who, at the end of the play, gives a triumphant performance. If there is a theme in the play, it is what Weales calls "willful blindness." The theatrical world, with its deliberate falsity, is an especially apt setting. Each of the three characters begins with a self-created set of illusions which he is forced to shed in the course of the play, thereby gaining new insights. Frank believes his own lies, plays the role of a happy man, unable to admit that his lack of confidence has made him an alcoholic and, though dependent on Georgie, he pretends that his wife is neurotic. Bernie, according to Weales, tries to "fit Frank and Georgie into preconceived roles," and refuses to see the reality of the Elgin marriage, which becomes more and more obvious to the audience. Georgie, who is, as the title suggests, the central character, also lives a self-created lie. She has convinced herself that Frank is dependent on her and that she must protect him; she refers to herself as an "old lady" and acts more like Frank's mother than his wife. However, as Shuman has suggested, "were Frank to take command of the situation, Georgie would be thoroughly miserable." The ending of the play is ambiguous; although Frank has recognized the truth about himself and has been able to make a comeback and Georgie has decided to stay with him, her speech points to future conflicts due to their new awareness and roles: "Neither of us has really changed. And yet I'm sure that both our lives are at some sort of turning point. There's some real new element of hope here--I don't know what. But I'm uncertain ... and you, Frank, have to be strong enough to bear that uncertainty." Ambiguity in the ending of a political play like Awake and Sing! is a weakness, but in a psychological play like The Country Girl , it is a virtue. More than other Odets plays, The Country Girl has been successfully revived; in 1968 it was updated and produced as Winter Journey, Odets's second title for the play. Odets was correct when he termed the play a "theater piece"; free from topicality, the play has a universal appeal. In the spring of 1952, Odets was called to testify before a Subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee. In the course of his testimony, he mentioned the names of individuals he believed to have been members of the communist Party during the 1930s. Kanfer points out that Odets actually "named" no one, because the people he mentioned were either dead or had already been named to the HUAC. Nevertheless, the act of testifying gave him a "sense of incalculable revulsion." Kanfer reports Odets wept at the funeral of John Garfield (who had acted in several of Odets's plays and whose sudden death was precipitated by his being blacklisted), and Clurman in All People Are Famous (1974) says that Odets went weeping to Garfield's widow to confess that he had not testified as he should have. He had not testified against Garfield at all; he stated to the Committee that he did not know Garfield to be a Communist. However, he did name, among others, Tony Kraber, a producer whom Odets knew from his Group Theatre days, as a former member of the Party. Kanfer writes that when Kraber answered his doorbell in the middle of the night a few weeks later, he found Odets there, who said "I named you" and ran off. Apparently his guilt continued to torment him for years, and after 1952 he wrote relatively little. Odets's last play was The Flowering Peach (1954), an adaptation of the biblical story of Noah. In writing it, Odets drew on a long tradition of plays based on the deluge (particularly Andre Obey's Noah, 1931) and borrowed elements found in them: domestic comedy, dialect humor, anachronisms, and modern philosophical argument. When the play was produced in 1954, there was the suggestion that Odets had a contemporary interpretation in mind, that the ark was a symbol of the bomb shelter.This view has some validity but is not essential for an appreciation of the play. The play was well received and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, but that award was given instead to Tennessee Williams 's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In 1970 a musical adaptation of The Flowering Peach, Two by Two by Peter Stone, Richard Rodgers, and Martin Charnin, had a successful run on Broadway. In Odets's play, Noah, according to Weales, is a "somewhat seedy patriarch, rather too given to drink" The play begins as Noah awakens from a dream in which he has been told by God of the coming events. His family, of course, doubts him, until the animals begin to arrive. The first scenes consist of gentle Jewish-family comedy, and the serious nature of the play does not begin to emerge until the philosophical confrontation between Noah and his youngest son, Japheth. Noah is a staunch advocate of acceptance of God's will; Japheth, a rationalist, challenges a God who would destroy so many people and refuses to board the ark. After Japheth is knocked out and physically carried aboard, their differences continue. Japheth wants to use a rudder to steer, and Noah believes that God will steer the ark for them. Noah is proved wrong when the ark strikes a submerged object and springs a leak, and he is forced to admit that perhaps God would accept some human assistance. Noah's gentle and patient wife, Esther, tries to keep the peace between father and son. Her motivation is to keep the family together; she dies of old age at the end of the voyage as the sons and their wives go off in different directions to start new families. Noah's two other sons, Shem and Ham, are less important characters. Shem is a businessman and opportunist who nearly causes the ark to sink by hoarding manure from which he intends to manufacture dried manure briquettes that he can sell later. Ham is a playboy who no longer loves his wife, Rachel, and lusts after Goldie, a woman Noah brought along as a wife for Japheth. However, Japheth doesn't love Goldie, but Rachel. A wife-swapping arrangement would please everyone involved except Noah, who believes that it is against God's commandments. Goldie and Rachel are pregnant, and before Esther dies, she asks that Noah agree to the alternate marriages, which he eventually does. True to the biblical version, the ark lands on a mountaintop in April, the month of rebirth. Japheth and Noah have both changed--the son is no longer rebellious, and the father has learned that it is better to maintain order through love than through blind adherence to God's commandments. Noah's closing speech is, in typical Odetsian fashion, affirmative and optimistic: "Thank you, Lord above, thank you .... But what I learned on this trip, dear God, you can't take away from me. To walk in humility, I learned. And listen, even to myself .... and to speak softly, with the voices of consolation. Yes, I hear you, God--Now it's in man's hands to make or destroy the world ... I'll tell you a mystery." Mendelsohn suggests that these last words of Odets's to be spoken on Broadway are a fitting valedictory. His last play, although permeated with the same optimism that inspired his plays of the early 1930s, is considerably gentler in tone. Odets himself had learned to "speak softly, with the voices of consolation." After The Flowering Peach closed in 1955, Odets returned to California, where he lived for the rest of his life. He said he intended to write more plays, but he did not. He wrote three screen plays, The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), The Story on Page One (1960), which he also directed, and Wild in the Country (1961); in 1963 he was working on scripts for "The Richard Boone Show", a television drama series, when he was hospitalized for an operation for ulcers. He died of cancer three weeks later. His eulogy, written by Harold Clurman and delivered by Danny Kaye, stressed his humanitarian message and his gift of love. Odets said of his own work, "All of my plays ... deal with one subject: the struggle not to have life nullified by circumstances, false values, anything." Although his techniques changed considerably during the course of his career, from the strident call for action of Waiting for Lefty to the quiet allegory of The Flowering Peach, Odets always wrote about the individual trying to maintain his sense of identity in the midst of an often hostile world. His plays are filled with brilliant dialogue, an emphasis on the importance of the family, and a profound belief in the dignity of the human race. Although Odets as a playwright is clearly not of the stature of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, or Edward Albee, he rightfully has a respected position in the history of American drama. Papers: Typescripts of "I Got the Blues" (original title of Awake and Sing!), The Silent Partner, and "The Cuban Play", and continuity scripts of three screenplays are at the Library of Congress. Typescripts of variant versions of a number of the published plays and one screenplay are in the Performing Arts Research Center of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center.
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Jump to Additional DLB Essay(s) on this Author: About this Essay: Beth Fleischman, University of South Carolina Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 7: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by John MacNicholas, University of South Carolina. The Gale Group, 1981. pp. 126-139. Source Database: Dictionary of Literary Biography |
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