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(Photo: Joan Marcus/Courtesy of Boneau Bryan Brown) |
Still, the show is just dirty enough to delight some in the crowd—that is, the conservatives. Elliott has done them the favor of fleshing out the slur that the left is shallow and sex-obsessed. He has also taken one of the modern theater’s most powerful and delightful attacks on the market’s injustice out of circulation for years. So we must turn to a different show that, in its quiet, workaday way comes closer to Brecht and Weill’s indictment of upwardly mobile criminality than this strenuous production ever will: The Sopranos.
After the silly menagerie of Threepenny, any play would look sublime. But I would have enjoyed Awake and Sing! even without the shellshock. Clifford Odets’s 1935 drama about a Jewish family in the Bronx shows its age at times; the call for revolution doesn’t have the old charge. Still, this man knew how to write a play, full of comedy and a slang that’s almost poetic. Lincoln Center’s new revival delivers it all beautifully.
Though Bartlett Sher gets fine work from Jonathan Hadary as the meek father and Ned Eisenberg as the hustling uncle, the family’s a clunky fit. Zoë Wanamaker’s motherly laments are a little too decorous; Mark Ruffalo is a touch too dreamy-romantic as wiseguy Moe Axelrod, and Lauren Ambrose is too modern-suburban for Hennie, a daughter of the Depression-era Bronx. In the end, these are only imperfections.
The play holds up because Odets didn’t cheat: He makes the case for chasing dreams (of love, of political change) but doesn’t pretend it’s easy—he doesn’t hide the steep human cost involved. In the canonical dramas of Williams, Miller, and O’Neill, characters typically pay dearly for their illusions, but Odets was different. Writing from the deepest sub-basement of the Great Depression, he wrote an almost-great play that dared to end with a flicker of hope, a suggestion that a new life is possible. Even now—especially now—it’s inspiring to see the dreamers win.
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