|
Review
Awake and Sing!
Belasco Theatre
June 9, 2006
Morgan Wycks
mwycks@nyconstage.org
What makes Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing! one of his better plays is that his usual polemics are deftly buried inside the domestic drama. Though there are some rants here and there, they come from characters that have been set up to do so and therefore one is willing to buy their stances and outbreaks. It helps that Lincoln Center's current production is a solid one.
Starting at the dinner table, we meet the Berger family; Bessie (Zoe Wanamaker), the wife and mother whose concern for propriety and place outweigh her ability to show love; her husband, Myron (Jonah an Hadary), the ineffectual hanger-on who gets by by getting by; their children Hennie ( Lauren Ambrose) , a woman who clearly wants to get out and find out what life can be about but has her gender in the way; Ralph (Pablo Schreiber), who also clearly wants to get out but has the chip on his shoulder of always having been deprived; and the patriarch, Jacob (Ben Gazarra), Bessie's father and Marxist wannabe who listens to Caruso records all day and, except for his grandchildren, keeps himself at arm's length from the rest of the family. Then there are the others - Moe Axlerod (Mark Ruffalo), the WWI amputee boarder with the colorful language disparaging anything he can while carrying a torch for Hennie; Uncle Morty (Ned Eisenberg), the unmarried but very successful business man with union problems and money matters on his mind; and Sam Feinschreiber (Richard Topol), the religious European neighbor and eventual, meek and ineffectual husband of Hennie. Set at the height of the Depression, Odets centers his plots on the children and how the others will respond to them, drawing parallels and parallelograms while doing so. Occasionally, the story rings hollow especially with Ralph's pining for a girl raised in an orphanage whom we only get to meet in one-sided telephone calls. But ultimately, the play moves toward an ending both heartbreaking and liberating at the same time.
As has been stated in many reviews, the achievement in the acting here is the ensemble work. The entire cast works, as should be the case with all productions, as a unit to present what needs to be presented, and they do it exceptionally well. That being said, my particular favorites were Ms. Ambrose who rarely seems like she's acting but simply lives the role and Mr. Ruffalo who takes the risk of hard selling Moe achieving laughs as well as pain. Mr. Gazarra, though not a detriment to the company, takes a slow and strangely repetitive cadenced approach to Jacob that tends to drag down an already astutely realistically paced production.
If Bartlett Sher has made a mistake it is with the symbolic disappearance of set pieces as the play proceeds. Representing both the disintegration of hearth, home and the known, and therefore safe, world and the freedom from the confines of that known world, Mr. Sher heavy-hands an already heavy-handed playwright. And that the disappearing set occurs during certain scenes makes one momentarily think that the stage-hands might be drunk or the stage manager has fallen asleep. Why take the trouble to trust your ensemble to do lovely work only to undo it?
...end |
