Awake and Sing!

Awake and Sing! packs three generations of one family into a cramped apartment during the Depression and lets them talk over each other until the pressure starts to show. The mother is holding the household together by force of will. Her son wants a life of his own. Her daughter is pregnant and about to be married off to solve a problem that is not hers.

Money is the subject of every conversation, including the ones that appear to be about something else. The grandfather quotes revolution from an armchair and does nothing. The son believes there is a better life available if he can only find the door into it. A relative with money enjoys being asked for it. Holding the whole thing upright is the mother, who is neither villain nor martyr - she is simply the only one willing to do what keeping a family afloat actually takes.

Clifford Odets wrote it in 1935 for the company that trained a generation of actors in what was then a new and unnervingly naturalistic method. It made his name almost overnight and set the template for the family play built around a kitchen table, an argument, and an economic situation that never leaves the room.

The writing is fast and highly stylised - immigrant speech rhythms worked into something close to music - and it is far funnier on its feet than it looks on the page. The politics are stated outright, but the play is more interested in what shortage does to affection than in winning an argument.

It suits anyone who likes a family drama in which nobody is allowed to leave the room, and audiences curious about where a century of playwriting in this vein began. Live, the overlapping talk is the whole effect.