Clifford Odets

Theatre[edit]

Odets pursued acting with great passion and ingenuity. At the age of 19 he struck out on his own, billing himself as "The Rover Reciter." Under this moniker he participated in talent contests and procured bookings as a radio elocutionist.^[5] He appeared in several plays with Harry Kemp's Poet's Theatre on the Lower East Side.^[6] Odets was among America's first real disc jockeys at about this time, at radio station WBNY and others in Manhattan, where he would play records and ad lib commentary. He also functioned as a drama critic, allowing him free entry to Broadway and downtown shows.^[7] In this capacity he saw the 1926 Broadway production of Seán O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock.^[8] O'Casey's work proved to be a powerful influence on Odets.


In the early 1920s, Odets spent four summers as a dramatics counselor at Jewish camps in the Catskills and the Poconos. He toured extensively with stock companies, in particular Philadelphia's popular Mae Desmond Company, playing a large variety of character roles at their theater in Chester, Pennsylvania. His first Broadway break came in 1929 when he was cast in two small roles and as understudy to the young Spencer Tracy in Conflict by Warren F. Lawrence.^[9] Odets landed his first job with the prestigious Theatre Guild in the fall of 1929 as an extra. He acted in small roles in a number of Theatre Guild productions between 1929 and 1931. It was at the Guild that he befriended the casting director Cheryl Crawford. Crawford suggested that Harold Clurman, then a play reader for the Guild, invite Odets to a meeting to discuss new theater concepts they were developing with Lee Strasberg.^[10] Though initially bewildered by the concept of acting as an art, Odets was nonetheless mesmerized by Clurman's talks and became the last actor chosen for the Group Theatre's first summer of rehearsals in June 1931 at Brookfield Center in Connecticut, thus becoming a founding member of the company.^[11][12]


The Group Theatre proved to be one of the most influential companies in the history of the American stage. It was the first to base its work on an acting technique new to the United States, devised by the Russian actor and director Constantin Stanislavski. It was further developed by Group Theatre director Lee Strasberg and became known as The Method or Method Acting.


From the start, Odets was relegated to small roles and understudying his Group colleagues. He understudied lead actor Luther Adler in the Group's production of John Howard Lawson's Success Story during the 1932–33 season. Much to Odets's frustration, Adler never missed a performance, but he gained much knowledge of the playwriting craft by standing in the wings and listening to the play. Odets credited Lawson with giving him an understanding of the potential theatrical power of colloquial language.^[13] With time on his hands and at Clurman's urging he began to try his own hand at writing plays.


Odets's earliest plays were an autobiographical piece, 910 Eden Street, and one about his hero, Beethoven, with the working title Victory. Clurman dismissed both as juvenilia but encouraged Odets to continue writing, while steering him toward familiar milieus. In late 1932, Odets began writing a play about a middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx, initially called I Got the Blues. He worked diligently on this play, sharing drafts of it with Clurman and promising parts to his fellow actors—often the same parts. While at Green Mansions, its 1933 summer rehearsal venue in Warrensburg, New York,^[14][15] the Group performed Act II of the play, soon to be retitled Awake and Sing!, for other camp residents. The audience was enthusiastic^[16] but the Group's leadership, Strasberg in particular, still opposed producing it.^[17][18]


Until his debut as a playwright, Odets continued to train as an actor with the Group at its various summer rehearsal headquarters in the Connecticut countryside and upstate New York. In addition to Brookfield Center and Green Mansions, these venues included Dover Furnace in Dutchess County (1932)^[19][20] and a large house in the Catskill village of Ellenville (1934).^[21][22] The Group spent the summer of 1936^[23][24] at Pine Brook Country Club in Fairfield County, Connecticut.^[25] Its final summer retreat was at Lake Grove, in Smithtown, New York, in 1939.^[26][27] Odets's exposure to Strasberg's philosophy was essential to his development as a playwright. He said in an interview late in life, "My chief influence as a playwright was the Group Theatre acting company, and being a member of that company ... And you can see the Group Theatre acting technique crept right into the plays."^[28]


Odets became the first produced Method-trained playwright with his first publicly presented play, the one-act Waiting for Lefty, on January 6, 1935, at the former Civic Repertory Theatre on Fourteenth Street in New York City. The occasion was a benefit performance for New Theatre Magazine.^[29] Like Lawson, a member of the Communist Party, Odets was by this time influenced by Marxism and his plays became increasingly political. Waiting for Lefty was inspired by the 1934 New York City taxi strike and is written in the format of a minstrel show with interconnected scenes depicting social and economic dilemmas of workers in various fields. The focus alternates between a union meeting of taxi drivers and vignettes from the workers' fraught lives. A young medical intern falls victim to anti-Semitism; a laboratory assistant's job is threatened if he refuses to spy on a colleague; couples are thwarted in marriage and torn apart by the hopelessness of economic conditions caused by the Depression. The climax is a defiant call for the taxi drivers' union to strike, which brought the entire opening night audience to its feet with tumultuous applause. The play does not require a proscenium stage and can be performed in any acting space, including union meeting halls and on the street. Waiting for Lefty's unexpectedly wild success brought Odets international fame, though its strong pro-union bent caused it to be banned in many U.S. towns and cities. It was produced by a number of left-wing theaters in Britain, Australia, and other English-speaking countries, and has been widely translated.


Awake and Sing! was written in 1933 and finally produced by the Group Theatre in February 1935 after the success of Waiting for Lefty. This first of Odets's full-length plays is generally regarded as his masterpiece and has been cited as "the earliest quintessential Jewish play outside the Yiddish theatre."^[30] The play concerns the Berger family, who struggle to maintain some respectability and self-esteem in the Longwood section of the Bronx while grappling with the stresses of economic collapse. Odets's choice to open the play in medias res, his heightened dialogue style, its blatant bias towards the working class, and the fact that it was the first play on Broadway to focus entirely on a Jewish family distinguish Awake and Sing! from other full-length plays produced on Broadway during this time.


Odets became the Group's signature playwright with the debuts of Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing! and his reputation is inextricably connected with the Group Theatre.