CLIFFORD ODETS and the THEATRE of the '30S Robert Skloot

1 OUR DEBT TO ODETS: CLIFFORD ODETS AND THE THEATRE OF THE ‘30s Robert Skloot University of Wisconsin-Madison The commemorations of the centennial year of Clifford Odets’ birth, of which this paper may be the last example, have seen a number of events that restore, perhaps only temporarily, his name to the list of historically important American playwrights. There can’t be, of course, any guarantee that a playwright’s work will live on after death, and artistic graveyards are full of plays and novels, symphonies and landscapes that once had received both attention and predictions of eternal success. It is the critic’s job to visit and explore these cemeteries (in which, as in all such places, history can be found and interpreted) to see if the digging up of bones might reveal either a premature burial or something asleep and requiring an awakening. In the preface to the publication of his first six plays Odets himself commended his work thus: “My belief...is that the plays will say whatever is to be said; most of them have bones in them and will stand up unsupported.” (Odets, ix) The central question attached to the centennial commemoration is this: what are we to make of Clifford Odets’ plays, that work for which he will be remembered, early in the 21st century? and do they yet contain some things of interest to us seven decades on? It’s probably no surprise that I’ll provide an affirmative answer, and I’ll attempt to assess his work from a perspective I think will be both revealing and useful in advocating for Odets’ rehabilitation beyond the commemorative proceedings of which this talk is one small, belated contribution. Curiously, coming upon Odets today involves the close reading of bones, in this case celebrity obituaries. Jane Wyman, who died late last year at 96 acted in the 1940 Odets play Night Music; Jack Warden, dead at 86 last year became an actor after reading Waiting for Lefty and acted in the 1952 revival of Golden Boy that Odets himself directed. Both Fay Wray and Uta Hagen, actresses who passed away in 2004 were connected to Odets, the former as one of the many women he slept with and abandoned, and the latter who won a Tony for playing the title role of The Country Girl in 1950, the same Odets role that Grace Kelly won the Academy Award for in 1955, a fact mentioned by the cultural critic Stanley Fish in his New York Times blog a few months ago. A crucial biographical fact of Odets’ beginnings is a place to start this discussion: he was the second-generation product of an immigrant experience. Odets was born in 1906, the son of Jews who were mostly ambivalent toward their religion but sympathetic to their “old world” culture as can be heard in the distinctive Yiddish inflections of his colorful best dialog. As countless books, plays and films have told us, this was a time of massive settlement into the promised land, “promised” because America, freedom’s land, held the promise of advancement and wealth through hard work. Many, of course, had already redeemed the promise by the time Odets’s parents Pearl and Lou appeared on the streets of Philadelphia. Following in the tradition that a new country needed a new name, Clifford’s family name Gorodetsky would be chopped 2 at both ends, “like a herring in a Greek salad” as Moe says about Hennie Berger in Awake and Sing!, though the persona he assumed rejected being a man of the middle. Odets’s adolescence occurred in a time of economic success for many of America’s new citizens...and not just because you had the right connections and the right skin color to take advantage of the best schools and the right neighborhoods. He came of the newly-arrived middle-class. His abusive, vindictive and overbearing father had climbed from instability and want to financial success in a printing business. His mother, small and delicate, spent her whole married life terrorized by L.J. (the “J” had no meaning, but was added to give Lou a name with more heft and substance) died early at 47. Clifford, oldest of three children, was a terrible student, excelling at nothing in his short high school career except public speaking. He existed mostly unhappily in a family that shamed him for his perceived weakness and rejected his need for love. Filled with insecurity and resentment, he came to see his personal unhappiness as somehow attached to the national insecurity that would soon settle upon the land. All his work, writes Odets’ biographer Margaret Brenman-Gibson, reveals “the deeper struggle born of his own family but inseparable from the larger sweep of developing history.” (249). At age 23 in 1929, when the bottom fell out of America and the world, Odets, whose employment was reduced to performing bit acting roles and memorized poems at theatres and on radio, was desperate to find the best and right fit for his talents; he found it as a member of another kind of family, a theatre family, and one that achieved notoriety in its time as the voice of artistic revolution. The year was 1931. If you were alive in the thirties and attuned to the cultural developments of the day, you could hardly have avoided the passionate argument surrounding the place of the arts in the country’s distressed economy. Remember, it was a time of massive upheaval of a kind not seen before or since, a time of two overriding fears: that American society was on the verge of collapse, and that fascism’s conquest was at hand at home and abroad. Under President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, specifically the WPA (Works Progress Administration), the arts became part of the effort to break the back of the Depression. Thus, you could not have avoided hearing of the Group Theatre and other companies like it, and the excitement it brought to those heady and beleaguered times. In the words of one historian: “The work of the major dramatists of the period...unquestionably reflects an intense, active concern with the political and social issues raised by the Depression and the rise of fascism.” (Rabkin, 28) That remarkable confluence of history and artistic energy is a story told often, and I’ll be brief in my description of it. It was two years after the market’s crash that three visionaries came together to establish a new kind of theatre for America. Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg (both Jewish) and Cheryl Crawford founded a company of artists who sought to change what America was: impoverished, depressed, and adrift, for something better: more communal, more secure, more just. Weales quotes Clurman, the intellectual leader of the triumvirate, as finding in the Group: “Here was companionship, security, work, and dreams.” (Clifford Odets, 29). Of the arts, the theatre was to be the first among equals in the turbulent politics of the day. Odets signed on as an actor, though he never 3 impressed anyone with his abilities, in fact quite the opposite. In any case, he was up against the toughest competition of his or any day, as the original cast of Golden Boy attests: Frances Farmer, Luther Adler, Lee J. Cobb, Jules (later John) Garfield, Morris Carnovsky (at 29, the oldest of the original actors), Phoebe Brand, Robert “Bobby” Lewis, Karl Malden who had the smallest and most hysterical of roles at the very end, and lastly, Elia Kazan, nicknamed “Gadge,” America’s most heralded and influential stage and film director whose autobiography is one of the most readable and important chronicles of these troubled times. It was in January, 1935, with the writing of a play as an entry into a contest sponsored by a left-wing magazine, that Odets was truly catapulted into a fame that, when the truth was retrospectively known, he would spend the rest of his life trying to recapture. The play was Waiting for Lefty, and it was followed in quick succession by Awake and Sing!, Till the Day I Die and Paradise Lost, a year’s work on which his reputation, then and now, would largely be based. We speak today of a career cresting too quickly, and perhaps that was the case with Odets, but for the moment he was, depending on whom you read: the voice of the new age, the visionary/savior of America from its complacent, rotten middle-classness, or just “poet of the Jewish middle class.” (Warshow, 22) Gerald Weales sums up: “Odets is so identified with the 1930s that a mention of his name elicits stock responses, the recollection of a time when literature was a weapon and leftist optimism almost mandatory.” (Clifford Odets, 15) It’s important to remember that Odets was not the only playwright of his generation, or even of this decade that began so badly in October, 1929. Near the end of the 30s decade, in December, 1938, Time magazine put Odets’ photo on its cover with the caption “Down with the general Fraud!” But an irony emerges when we know that the biggest song hit of 1938 was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and the best selling book for two years running was Gone With the Wind. Perhaps even more interesting was the play that won the Pulitzer Prize that year, a script that has outlived all of the plays of its time, Odets’ included: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Wilder’s play represents, I believe, a theatrical achievement completely opposed to Odets’ work and what he hoped the theatre could accomplish.

Load more