AWAKE AND SING by Clifford Odets, directed by Miles Potter (Soulpepper). Young Centre (55 Mill). To July 31. $28-$68. 416-866-8666, soulpepper.ca. Rating: NNN
Awake And Sing, Clifford Odets’ portrait of a Jewish family in a New York tenement during the Depression, might be subtitled Dreams In The Dust.
Three generations of the Berger family do their best to make ends meet, never fully losing hope for a better life and a better world. Grandfather Jacob (William Webster) is a Marxist who listens to Caruso singing about paradise, mother Bessie (Nancy Palk) runs the family with a keen eye to improving the lot of her children (even if it’s only what she thinks their lot should be), father Myron (Derek Boyes) is an easy-going guy who doesn’t like to make problems for anyone.
It’s the kids who are the most tensely wound. Ralph (Jonathan Gould) desires more than a two-bit factory job and Hennie (Sarah Wilson), wooed by several men (Ari Cohen and Matthew Edison, one sharp-edged, the other diffident), wants to know true love and control her own life.
Odets’s script has an emotional richness that an ensemble company like Soulpepper should be able to open up. But at opening, director Miles Potter’s first act was too fussy with actors working on New York accents and giving a period feel to the piece the Yiddish constructions sounded foreign in some actors’ mouths.
The result? Little emotional focus.
Happily, those problems largely disappear in the second act, when we finally get to understand these people, recognize each character’s attempt to find fulfilment and escape a desperate life. Much of the production’s second half is gripping theatre.
The best work in the show comes from Cohen’s disillusioned, energetic Moe, whose wheeler-dealer veneer masks insecurities and his desire for Hennie he and Wilson spar almost constantly, but there’s a sexual undertone that crackles with electricity. Some of the scenes involving the pair and Edison, whose Sam is a good soul who wants to do his best, have the feel of Chekhovian comedy-drama.
Michael Hanrahan provides some good comedy as Morty, Bessie’s well-off brother in the shmateh trade, whose politics are so different from his lower-class relatives.
By the end, the cast – notably Gould and Wilson – captures the play’s heady possibilities for the future, touching the viewer at a deep level. That emotional connection between audience and actors should happen earlier in the show.
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