[REVIEW] “Awake and Sing!” exposes a loving family, full of secrets and lies

by Suzi Steffen on January 30, 2012 · 1 comment

University Theatre’s “Awake and Sing!” reflects the past – and comments on the present

“Awake and Sing!” runs through Feb. 4 at the Hope Theatre; tickets are $12-14 and free for UO students who get there early enough

During hard times, families lean on each other – sometimes to the point of suffocation, as the University Theatre‘s production of “Awake and Sing!” shows all too clearly.

In this 1935 piece by Clifford Odets, a Jewish family lives in cramped quarters in New York, with son Ralphie (Ryan Dougherty) sleeping on the day bed in the living room so that the family can take in a boarder to help pay the rent and daughter Hennie (Maggie May Stabile) living miserably under her all too devoted (and glaringly intrusive) mother’s thumb – and their grandfather Jacob (Jonas D. Israel), a devoted socialist who loves to listen to his records of Enrico Caruso, in one of the other bedrooms. The mom, Bessie (Erica Jorgensen), is not best pleased with having her father in the house.

Ralph and his ineffectual, helpless father Myron (Greg Faber) work for Bessie’s brother Morty (Steve Wehmeier). Morty’s a man of wealth; he’s always sleek and smiling, wearing a three-piece suit and sporting a lovely hat, coat and (as he repeats several times) “fur gloves.” This is the height of the Great Depression, mind you, and Morty’s store isn’t thriving, but he’s not crushed by misery and cramped, close quarters the way his sister’s family is.

That’s the setup. Things happen, as they do in life and in theater – Hennie marries for convenience; Ralph falls in love with someone entirely impractical for a young man who earns a pathetic salary and sees his time cut as the Depression worsens. Bessie takes in Moe (Kyle Leibovitch), a cynical, sleazy, compelling WWI veteran who’s a friend to Jacob and an admirer of Hennie. As various lies start swirling around the stage and as Jacob ratchets up his socialist rhetoric in the face of his daughter’s venal and aggressive practicality, the bitterness of a hardscrabble family barely hanging on to lower-middle-class life starts to turn rancid.

As various lies start swirling around the stage and as Jacob ratchets up his socialist rhetoric in the face of his daughter’s venal and aggressive practicality, the bitterness of a hardscrabble family barely hanging on to lower-middle-class life starts to turn rancid.

Play Director Damond Morris, a University of Oregon (UO) grad student, must deal not only with the mixed-skill level and age spread of his cast but a play that feels so specific to a place and time that those who don’t know much about New York in the 1930s might not understand too many of the speeches or the specific overtones of people’s actions. That’s okay – we watch Shakespeare too, and who knows how many 1599-specific jokes we’re missing when we watch “As You Like It“ or”Hamlet“ – but that means the actors need to understand what they’re saying, and they need to understand the rhythms of this family’s life.

As Morty, Wehmeier (another UO grad student, and a familiar face from many of Fred Crafts’ charming Radio Redux productions) serves up exactly the combination of slimy self-satisfaction and defensive self-pity that marks certain current politicians running for high office. And Dougherty’s Ralphie, after a rocky first act, gets it together in the second act and starts to shine. The other second-act wonder is Leibovitch’s Moe, who’s still sleazy as can be but who does good work on behalf of the formerly passive Ralph. Both characters come into their own with fewer actors on stage, and both rise to the writing of the end of the second act.

One of the toughest things about acting is staying interested, engaged and in character as other characters make speeches. “Awake and Sing!” is particularly stuffed with speechifying, and that means that the director needs to make sure his actors don’t stay frozen with one expression (in one case, a brow so inexpertly and constantly furrowed that I winced every time I saw this actor) as the others talk.

The set, by Colin Lawrence III (whom I know best for his acting, but hey (look!), he’s a fabulous scenic designer as well), seems both ambitious for this space and perfect for this play, and theatre prof Sandy Bonds’ costumes bring out the differences between old and young, between poor and wealthy and even between hopeful and hopeless.

The play’s interesting, and hard. The choices for Bessie and then for Hennie aren’t exactly super ones; one wants to emit a deep hurrah for birth control and legal abortion so that families don’t suffer the way this family does. Seriously: Birth control is a wondrous thing, helping both women and men out of poverty. Yay for it!

Odets was a left-winger and an eventual member of the Communist Party, but he doesn’t spare Jacob, a cantankerous old speechifier who has alienated both of his children and doesn’t appear to care about anyone but Ralphie. And even in his love for his grandson, Jacob badly misjudges his son and daughter and their inability to offer a true form of caring.

No one’s good in this play; no one’s entirely bad. Everyone’s living under tension and stress, with little hope for the future and certainly no aspirations for anything higher than survival. That’s the way it was, in 1933 and 1934; that’s the way it is, in 2011 and 2012, when families struggle for work, have no health care, can’t afford a hospital and pray that the life insurance comes through. Sometimes that pulls families together – and sometimes it sends them flying far apart.