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Audience Guide Written and compiled by Jack Marshall September 9–October 8, 2011 Theatre Two, Gunston Arts Center Theater you can afford to see— plays you can’t afford to miss! About The American Century Theater The American Century Theater was founded in 1994. We are a professional company dedicated to presenting great, important, but overlooked American plays of the twentieth century . what Henry Luce called “the American Century.” The company’s mission is one of rediscovery, enlightenment, and perspective, not nostalgia or preservation. Americans must not lose the extraordinary vision and wisdom of past playwrights, nor can we afford to surrender our moorings to our shared cultural heritage. Our mission is also driven by a conviction that communities need theater, and theater needs audiences. To those ends, this company is committed to producing plays that challenge and move all Americans, of all ages, origins and points of view. In particular, we strive to create theatrical experiences that entire families can watch, enjoy, and discuss long afterward. These audience guides are part of our effort to enhance the appreciation of these works, so rich in history, content, and grist for debate. The American Century Theater is a 501(c)(3) professional nonprofit theater company dedicated to producing significant 20th Century American plays and musicals at risk of being forgotten. The American Century Theater is supported in part by Arlington County through the Cultural Affairs Division of the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Resources and the Arlington Commission for the Arts. This arts event is made possible in part by the Virginia Commission on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as by many generous donors. Contents The Playwright: Clifford Odets . 1 Odets in Hollywood . 5 From Play to Film: The Transformation of A Country Girl . 8 Clifford Odets Quotations . 17 A Clifford Odets Timeline . 18 2011–2012 Season . back cover The Playwright: Clifford Odets (1906–1963) —Jack Marshall 1935 was the year of Clifford Odets. Few playwrights, maybe none, have ever been so active, so influential, and so in harmony with the tensions of the times as the 29-year-old writer was that year. Was it all downhill after that? Some think so. Unquestionably, no writer ever approached such prominence having given so little warning based on the beginning of his career. Before 1935, Odets had been a socialist-revolutionary actor of no distinction whose best move was choosing his companions well. He had joined with the politically like- minded Cheryl Crawford, Lee Strasberg, and Harold Clurman in 1931 to split off from the junior acting company of the moderate Theatre Guild and form the Group Theatre, which was to transform the American stage. Thus Odets became a cofounder of one of the bravest and most significant theater organizations in American theater history. But his contribution to the Group didn’t end there, for he was literally its clearest voice. He had begun writing plays that would advance the company’s objective of brewing an American brand of the Stanislavski acting principles, applied to ensemble, rather than individual, performing. His first was a draft of what would eventually become Awake and Sing!, called I’ve Got the Blues. (An unwritten essay or unplayed parlor game lies waiting on the fascinating topic of “Discarded Titles of Great American Plays” and the associated question of whether these classics would have succeeded under their original headings. Oklahoma!, for instance, was nearly called Yessireee! But the really interesting question is this: How many failed or forgotten plays lie in the theater archives that lacked only the right title to achieve critical recognition, box office success, and, perhaps, immortality? Ah, Machinal . .) I’ve Got the Blues was earnest but depressing, and Odets’s Group colleagues patted him on the head as they suggested he go memorize his lines. 1935, however, changed everything, because everything was changing. The Great Depression was deeper than ever, but structural changes in the American economy and perhaps the world were on the horizon. Revolution was in the air: there had already been one in Austria, and France was in the 1 throes of its General Strike. Labor was organizing for a big push in America. People were poor and angry, and there were a lot of them. The theater world in New York functioned like a big filter that captured the most flamboyant, ambitious, brilliant, and leftist American artists, and the New Theater League was born—a cooperative enterprise by many socialist-leaning organizations, including the Group Theatre. The League offered a one-act play competition with revolutionary politics as its theme. Odets locked himself in his room for three days and walked out of it with Waiting for Lefty, a furious and theatrical account of a taxicab strike. This play wasn’t depressing—it was exhilarating. It not only won the prize, it won the confidence of Odets’s Group colleagues. He was a playwright after all! The group brought Waiting for Lefty to Broadway, where it was popular even with audiences who didn’t share its politics. Using flashbacks and the explosive dialogue that remained Odets’s trademark for thirty years, it was just plain entertaining theater. Entertaining and politically provocative: that was the Odets recipe, and when he got the balance just right, success followed. The Group and Odets hedged their bets a bit by filling out the Broadway evening with an anti-German fascism play, Till the Day I Die, just to make sure that the non-Pinkos in the seats had something to agree with. Now Odets dusted off I’ve Got the Blues again and fleshed it out. The Group brought that to Broadway, too, under its new title. Odets also took a lot of the Jewishness out of his play—something the Group felt was essential for commercial viability. Blues contained many Yiddish words and Hebrew cultural references; not its new incarnation, Awake and Sing! Now it worked, for critics went gaga: Not only was this Odets kid a political firebrand with showbiz in his veins, he could also be funny, sentimental, and insightful. Awake and Sing! was called Chekhovian, and Odets was the new Eugene O’Neill. Well, O’Neill he wasn’t, but he was the new Clifford Odets, and that was pretty good, too. (Ironically, as soon as the play was a success, it was translated into Yiddish, and became a staple of the Yiddish theater circuit.) Odets craved success. He was no William Saroyan: It wasn’t enough for him to move one audience member or to have “one human being sing his song.” Odets wanted big reviews, big ticket sales, big praise. Philadelphia-born to a more or less middle class family in 1906, Odets clearly embraced the 2 nobility of the struggling lower class and identified with the poor, but he also had both a hatred and a fear of the trappings of poverty. Perhaps this is because, unlike fellow Group-traveler Saroyan, he had never been that poor. Saroyan threw away money like it was the daily trash and often seemed to resent success. Odets would do anything, even compromise his artistic principles, to achieve it. In 1935, he thought he had the formula down pat—and a guaranteed cheering section. This is why the failure of his next play, Paradise Lost, bewildered and upset him. It, too, had its roots in I’ve Got the Blues, but Odets was certain that it was richer, tougher, more profound, and better structured than either of his previous hits. Critics disagreed. To his dying day, Odets maintained that it was his best work, a common phenomenon among great playwrights. They always are loyal to the unloved child. The failure of Paradise Lost sent Odets to Hollywood and the movies, though his first trip there didn’t last long. He was back on Broadway with Golden Boy in 1937, and it was his biggest hit—the Group Theater’s biggest hit—and the play that guaranteed that even if his star fell completely (and it did), Clifford Odets would never be completely forgotten. Golden Boy was a boxing saga with the plot of a hundred subsequent B movies. Joe Bonaparte wants to be a boxer; his father wants him to be, yes, a violinist. Joe chooses to be a gladiator, not a musician. He kills a man in the ring, and his girl seemingly deserts him, but they are reunited. Then they drive off into the sunset, only to die in a car crash. Perfect. Harold Clurman, Odets’s director, champion, and friend, directed the play as an allegory, which it was. Odets was exploring the dual paths of the destructive (boxing) and the creative (music). Odets’s manner of presenting his social parable rather than his message is what makes the play work. New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson wrote that what made Odets different from the usual variety of theatrical polemicists is that he didn’t talk about ideas as much as he showed them. During the run of Golden Boy, the playwright fell in love with the beautiful and emotional actress who portrayed the play’s doomed heroine, Laura. She was Frances Farmer, and, when Odets ended their affair out of shame and regret (he was married at the time), she began her long, epic, downward 3 spiral into depression, alcoholism, self-destruction, and madness. What effect this had on Odets can only be speculated upon, but he was, unlike many artists, a kind and sensitive man. Farmer’s fate, which included nightmarish confinement in an asylum and probably a frontal lobotomy, has haunted those who have only read about it or seen the Jessica Lange biopic, Frances.

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