Awake and Sing!
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Review of Awake and Sing!
TimeLine makes Odets 'Sing' - Highly Recommended

reviewed by Hedy Weiss
Chicago Sun Times
10/22/02

War looms across the ocean, anti-Semitism is on the rise, capitalism is corrupt, the American economy is shaken to its roots, immigrants are uneasy and the family unit is in upheaval. No, this isn't a rundown of contemporary headlines, but a concise summary of the themes that run through the plays of Clifford Odets, one of the hottest playwrights of the 1930s, and a man whose work now speaks loudly to contemporary audiences.

Chicago theater companies seem to have a particular flair for Odets' work, perhaps because they were originally written for New York's fabled Group Theatre, whose close-knit, close-to-the-bone way of working was a model for this city's Off-Loop ensembles. Whatever the reason, with director Louis Contey's riveting, emotionally explosive revival of Odets' 1935 classic "Awake and Sing" now at TimeLine Theatre, and a beautifully acted revival of his 1938 drama "Rocket to the Moon" running through Dec. 15 at Glencoe's Writers' Theatre, something of an unofficial Odets festival is in progress at the moment.

At TimeLine, you know something special is cooking from the moment the lights dim. In a brilliant solution to the problem that confronts every director—making the first few minutes of a play seem a continuation of life rather than an artificial entrance into a fictional world—Contey sacrifices a bit of clarity for atmosphere, and his gamble pays off. At first, all you hear is snatches of an agitated dinner conversation in the Berger family's Bronx apartment as they sit around a table in the recessed dining room of Noelle C.K. Hathaway's marvelously realistic timeworn set. You can pick out bits of the conversation—about money and dreams and the latest news. And you sense the heat that will soon be a full burn.

Like a filmmaker moving from long shot to closeup, Contey then draws the action downstage, making you feel you are a visitor in the apartment, where three generations of a Jewish-American family live in anxious proximity and economic uneasiness.

Bessie Berger (a wonderfully relentless Isabel Liss) is the domineering, manipulative, anything-for-survival matriarch who runs the household with an iron hand, and whose husband, Myron (White Spurgeon), is a sweet but weak man at peace with his failures.

Their grown children are restless and thwarted. Hennie Berger (a star turn by the lustrous Beth Lacke) is an unhappy beauty aching for a more glamorous life and unable to hide the fact that she is pregnant, and that her lover simply disappeared. Taunting her from the sidelines is Moe Axelrod (the hugely charismatic David Parkes, a true chameleon of an actor, at his demonic best here). An embittered but dangerously appealing World War I veteran and racketeer who is the family boarder, he is engaged in a strange love-hate relationship with Hennie that only intensifies after she marries Sam Feinschreiber (fine work by Scott Aiello), a poor, adoring new immigrant.

As for the boyish Ralph (Jesse Weaver, who makes his character a real mensch), he is thwarted from pursuing his first big love due to a lack of money and privacy. Only his beloved grandfather Jacob (Rich Baker, in a terrific performance with Old Testament overtones) takes him seriously, goading him on to a bold life and revolutionary acts out of a homemade blend of idealism and socialist fervor, and out of disgust for the rampant excesses of Bessie and his son Morty (a wonderfully odious Brian McCartney), a garment district fat-cat.

Odets weds the tensions between expectations and grim reality, despair and hope, passion and repression to a sense of the disintegration of moral values in a dog-eats-dog society. The insecurities and fears of first-generation Americans feed the play; so does the plight of recent immigrants like Schlosser (Richard Wehbe), the Bergers' janitor.

Contey, whose productions for Shattered Globe Theatre have long galvanized audiences, has assembled a TimeLine cast in which the ensemble work is as exceptional as the individual performances.

Nicole Rene Burchfield's period costumes, Charles Cooper's air-shaft-like lighting and Andrew Hansen's sound are excellent. So is a handsome lobby display that provides rich insights into Odets and the times that shaped him.

TimeLine will stage two more plays from the 1930s this season—a revival of John Logan's "Hauptmann" and the world premiere of Kate Fodor's "Hannah and Martin," about the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidigger. This is a must-see company.