BTF’s Awake and Sing! Allows Odets to sing in a new century

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Awake and Sing!, by Clifford Odets, directed by Elina de Santos. Playing at Berkshire Theatre Festival, Stockbridge, through July 28. It’s not just anywhere that one can find a production of an all-but-forgotten mainstay of American drama as this gem from the 1930s Group Theater. Seeing it, hearing the richness of the dialogue makes one wish that American theater companies had a similar respect for our own theatrical heritage as do the British for Shakespeare. As a matter of opinion, one would be far more likely this season to find productions of the bard than of anything from what was arguably America's richest movement in theater. While Eugene O’Neill may have been the father of the first great American drama, the tradition was vigorously developed by the Group Theatre, which produced serious, well-crafted theater that spoke to concerns that were specifically American but which had (and have) a universal reach. Bravo to the BTF for being one of the few theaters to keep the American tradition alive with a production as vital as this one. At the forefront of the Group movement, was Clifford Odets — or, at least, a trio of his plays: Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing! and Golden Boy. These works, particularly the second, examine dreams of a better, fully realized life in a country where oppression and opportunity exist achingly side by side. Ever the naturalist poet of the proletariat, Odets also grappled the problems that result from the pursuit of prosperity — namely, that it may simultaneously deaden one's true creative spirit. In Awake and Sing!, Odets decries what happens when “life is printed on dollar bills.” As Ellen Schiff notes in her worthy collection, Awake and Singing: 7 Classic Plays from the American Jewish Repertoire, the play is a significant part of a rich canon. Odets x-rays a household of three generations of Jews and reveals honest types as opposed to simple stereotypes in an enduring portrait of the struggle between pragmatic materialism and idealism. With her ineffectual husband, Myron, tied in apron strings, a gelded cock only able to doodle-do on the sidelines, the Berger roost is ruled by Bessie with talons of steel and wary, predatory eyes that miss nothing. Three others suffer under Bessie’s watch. Her daughter, Hennie, is a proud beauty whose future is being shoved at her on a tin plate containing the carcass of a barely warm turkey named Sam. Her son, Ralph, is hopelessly in love with a gentile (of whom Bessie disapproves with a frightening zeal) and flying against the bars of a dead-end job and a home that is but a cage gilt in guilt. Finally, Bessie’s father, Jacob, escapes his daughter’s dominion through Caruso records and his passion for Marxism with which he hopes to inspire Ralph’s deliverance. Simmering in and out of the background is Moe Axelrod, a cynical war veteran who is in love with Hennie and fighting two new battles, one against the hypocrisy he sees around him, the other against his own sentiment. The volatile mix of characters is rounded out by Uncle Morty, an intriguing mixture of greed and warmth in Alan Blumenfeld’s pithy performance. As Myron, John Rothman is, appropriately, a nonentity, but the performance doesn’t go quite far enough in making him real. Josh Radnor makes Ralph’s coming of age and into himself a very smooth and delicately wrought series of transitions, while Shiva Rose makes Hennie grow on us as she first shows us what Hennie has in common with Bessie and then gently paints in the differences. David Margulies registers poignantly as Jacob, and the power of his performance allows Jacob to become the much-needed soul of the play. Perhaps even more powerful, however, is Mark Feuerstein’s riveting Moe. Without uttering a word, he can project the most subtle of subtext; similarly, his discerning delivery of lines is acutely timed, and maximizes the landing of every word on the listener’s ear. Director Elina de Santos masterfully orchestrates the relationships between these characters; we truly have the sense of the cauldron of family dynamics. She is not, however, able to guide Marilyn Fox into an adequate performance in the pivotal role of the reigning matriarch. Bessie may have an umbilical cord made of piano wire, but Fox plays it as though it is barbed wire. For the play to achieve its potential and necessary depth, Bessie has to be more complex. We dislike this Bessie almost immediately; gradually, we come to loath her. Intellectually, we know her harsh actions come from a desire to protect her family. There is not, however, a jot of warmth in Fox to substantiate this and make it felt. It is a thoroughly strident performance delivered with little vocal variety and a relentlessly irritating assault on the ears. If the goal was to make Bessie a monster capable of holding her own in Jurassic Park, Fox has succeeded all too well. Lawrence Miller's scrim setting is rendered delicately and conveys the close overlapping of the family members’ lives while allowing glimpses of what goes on in their private, “offstage” moments. It is nicely complemented by Ann G. Wrightson’s discreet light design which simultaneously suggests the warmth of the family and the oppressiveness of the tenement life. Its one problematic character aside, this is a lovingly mounted production with a cast that savors the wonderful music inherent in the dialogue and allows Odets to sing clearly into the new century. Ralph Hammann of Williamstown is The Advocate’s chief theater critic.
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MCLA Announces Four Finalists for Next President

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts announced four finalists for the position of president, following a national search. 
 
The finalists were selected by the MCLA Presidential Search Committee and will participate in on-campus visits scheduled for the weeks of April 6 and April 13.
 
The successful candidate will replace President James Birge, who is retiring at the end of the term. 
 
The four finalists are David Jenemann, Michael J. Middleton, Sherri Givens Mylott, and Diana L. Rogers-Adkinson.
 

David Jenemann
David Jenemann is dean of the Patrick Leahy Honors College and professor of English and film and television studies at the University of Vermont, where he oversees recruitment, retention, curricular innovation, and advancement for an interdisciplinary college serving undergraduates from across the university, including UVM's campuswide Office of Fellowships, Opportunities, and Undergraduate Research. 
 
An internationally recognized scholar, he has published three books and numerous articles, with research spanning intellectual and cultural history, mass media, and the intersection of sports and society.
He holds a doctor of philosophy from the University of Minnesota and completed the Institute for Management and Leadership in Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
 
 
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