Almost Awake

Merrimack's Odets sings, but softly

by Steve Vineberg

By Clifford Odets. Directed by David G. Kent. Set design by Dex Edwards. Costumes by Frances N. McSherry. Lighting by Ann G. Wrightson. With Lori Wilner, Sam Gray, Greg Zola, Gareth Saxe, Mick Weber, Brandy Zarle, Bill Cohen, Ben Lipitz, and Victor J. Gregoire. At Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Lowell, Wednesday through Sunday through November 14.

Trapped together in a cramped apartment, laid low by the Depression and by their personal failures, the lower-middle-class Bronx Jews in Clifford Odets's great 1935 play Awake and Sing shake their fists at the sky and mutter semi-coherent threats at each other. "I mean something," they say, and "What you mean, I know, and what I mean I also know," and "All you know, I heard, and more yet." Odets finds the drama and the lyricism in the exasperation of people who keep crashing into walls and into each other; this is a blunt, angry, mean world. Odets wrote a happy (at least hopeful) ending because he was a faithful socialist who swallowed the party line that all revolutionary literature needed an upbeat finish, to keep the proletariat committed to a better future. But when you think back on the play, the rhetoric in the final few minutes drops out of your memory. Awake and Sing is an authentic American tragedy, and that's how it rings in your head.

David G. Kent's production at Merrimack Repertory Theatre establishes the setting persuasively within the opening moments. It's finely detailed, and I didn't catch an unintelligent choice made by any member of the talented nine-actor ensemble. The production is admirable in many ways, and yet it's a near-miss -- somehow, despite the conviction of the director and the cast and their meticulous working through of the text, the play is only occasionally moving. The problem may be partly that the company has fallen a little bit in love with the style -- with the surface rightness of accent and business, with the Yiddish songs that introduce each scene, with the theatricality of the project of getting another time and place on stage -- and missed the play's emotional undercurrent. In acting terms, the performers get all the beats but they miss the throughline. The pacing is remarkable (what is normally a three-hour drama comes in at two and a quarter), but the big scenes seem rushed; they don't build up the requisite momentum.

And for all the care Kent has obviously taken with the production, the world he reproduces isn't precisely Odets's. You'll recognize all the members of the Berger family: the faded patriarch, Jacob (Sam Gray), who believes in Karl Marx but lives in a world of Caruso records; his daughter Bessie (Lori Wilner), who really runs the family; her milquetoast husband, Myron (Mick Weber); their daughter Hennie (Brandy Zarle), who settles for a man she can barely tolerate when the father of her unborn child runs out on her; and fervent Ralph (Greg Zola), whose coming of age is the spine of the story. But Kent lays down the relationships with much more warmth and humor than other revivals of the play have churned up -- perhaps too much warmth and too much humor. The interaction of the family -- and of their boarder, the crippled WW1 vet Moe Axelrod (Gareth Saxe), and Hennie's dupe of a husband, Sam Feinschreiber (Ben Lipitz) -- lacks the bitterness that rises to fury in the play's second half. Toward the end of act two, Bessie takes out her frustration on her father in an act of shocking cruelty, but in this production I didn't see where it came from. And though Odets clearly modeled the misbegotten marriage of Hennie and Sam on that of Masha and Medvedenko in The Seagull, Kent directs Brandy Zarle to soft-pedal her distaste for Sam to such an extent that her final departure from the play lacks both the potency and the motivation it needs.

Still, there isn't a bad performance in the cast. I was particularly struck by Bill Cohen, who's the best Uncle Morty -- Bessie's brother, who runs a shmata business -- I've ever seen. You'll recognize this self-satisfied little man, with his fur gloves and his Turkish baths the family's single financial triumph, who throws dollar bills around but does nothing of substance to help out his needy sister and her brood. Yet Bessie adores him, because he exudes an air of success. (Lori Wilner is especially good in her scenes with him.) And though Ralph can be one of those colorless protagonists, Greg Zola ensures that the character is distinctive, sharply etched. It's no minor achievement that the ensemble does such solid and consistent work; this is not a production to be dismissed. But it comes short of the emotional flooding that the play can offer. Awake and Sing is the most powerful American family play this side of Long Day's Journey into Night. I wanted to stagger out of that theater.