Contemporary American Drama Fall 2008
Tuesday 9:10-12:00, College Theater
Faculty: Dr. Llyn Scott
Teaching Materials
Sample Timeline
CAD
Time Line 1920 - 1938
The Klu Klux Klan was basically based in the south of America. Here they targeted those set free
after the American Civil War - the African Americans. The KKK had never considered the
former slaves as being free and terrorised Africa American families based in the South. America
experienced great economic prosperity during the 1920's but not much of it filtered to the South.
Racism mixed with anger at their economic plight formed a potent cocktail.
Many different groups had emigrated to America over the years. One group - the Blacks - had
been brought there against their will and after the success of the northern states during the Civil
War and the freeing of the Blacks from slavery in 1865, a sinister group was established which
was designed to spread fear throughout the Black population that still lived in the southern states.
This was the KKK. Only WASP’s could belong to it — White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. It is a
common myth that the KKK targeted only the Blacks - also hated were the Jews, Catholics,
liberals etc but most hatred was directed against the poor black families in the south who were
very vulnerable to attack.
A meeting of the KKK in 1922
The leader of the KKK in the 1920’s was a dentist called Hiram Wesley Evans whose name in
the KKK was Imperial Wizard. The KKK were a violent organisation. The white hooded KKK
burnt churches of the black population, murdered, raped, castrated etc and they were rarely
caught as most senior law officers in the South were high ranking KKK men or sympathetic with
their aims - which was a white protestant south. Even white people who had contacts with the
blacks had reason to fear the KKK.
The Black Americans tried to fight back using non-violent methods. The NAACP (National
Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) asked Washington for new laws to help
combat the KKK violence but received very little, if any, help. In the 1920’s Black Americans
started to turn to the ‘Back to Africa’ movement which told blacks that they should return to
their native America. This was started by Marcus Garvey but the whole movement faltered when
he was arrested for fraud and sent to prison.
Time Line WW I (1914 – 1919) The Great War
Ref. Joe Crowell died in France, Our Town
Meuse-Argonne Offensive, also called the Battle of the Argonne Forest, was the final offensive
of World War I. It was the biggest operation and victory of the American Expeditionary Force
(AEF) in that war. The offensive took place in the Verdun Sector, immediately north and
northwest of the town of Verdun, between September 26 - November 11, 1918.
1920s, The Jazz Age
1929 The Stock Market Wall Street Crash
Let America be America Again
LANGSTON HUGHES 1938
http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1938/1938fr.html
Originally published in Esquire and in the International
Worker Order pamphlet A New Song (1938)
Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to
be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he
himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-- Let it be that great strong land of love Where
never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity
is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the
stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. I am the red
man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek-- And finding only the
same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope, Tangled in that ancient endless chain Of profit,
power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! Of work the
men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one's own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. I am the worker sold to the machine. I am the Negro,
servant to you all. I am the people, humble, hungry, mean-- Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers! I am the man who never got ahead, The poorest worker bartered
through the years.
Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream In the Old World while still a serf of kings, Who
dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, That even yet its mighty daring sings In every brick
and stone, in every furrow turned That's made America the land it has become. O, I'm the man
who sailed those early seas In search of what I meant to be my home-- For I'm the one who left
dark Ireland's shore, And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea, And torn from Black Africa's
strand I came To build a "homeland of the free."
The free?
Who said the free? Not me? Surely not me? The millions on relief today? The millions shot
down when we strike? The millions who have nothing for our pay? For all the dreams we've
dreamed And all the songs we've sung And all the hopes we've held And all the flags we've
hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay-- Except the dream that's almost dead today.
O, let America be America again-- The land that never has been yet-- And yet must be--the land
where every man is free. The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME-- Who
made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry,
whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose-- The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who
live like leeches on the people's lives, We must take back our land again, America!
O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath-- America
will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the
endless plain-- All, all the stretch of these great green states-- And make America again!
Time Line 1938
Kate Smith sings “God Bless America”
Dramaturgy and Details in Our Town: What grows in Our Town Gardens?
Heliotropism is the diurnal motion of plant parts (flowers or leaves) in response to the direction
of the sun. Heliotropic flowers track the sun's motion across the sky from East to West. During
the night, the flowers may assume a random orientation, while at dawn they turn again towards
the East where the sun rises. This behavior is exhibited, for example, by the snow buttercup
(Ranunculus adoneus), an alpine plant. The motion is performed by motor cells in a flexible
segment just below the flower, called a pulvinus. The motor cells are specialized in pumping
potassium ions into nearby tissues, changing the turgor pressure. The segment flexes because the
motor cells at the shadow side elongate due to a turgor rise. Heliotropism is a response to blue
light. If at night a heliotropic species is covered with a red transparent cover that blocks blue
light, the plant does not turn towards the sun the next morning. In contrast, if it is covered with a
blue transparent cover, the plant does track the sun.
Garden Heliotrope (Heliotropium arborescens) is a highly fragrant perennial plant, originally
from Peru. It is especially notable for its intense, rather vanilla-like fragrance.
Burdock
Burdock is native to Asia and Europe. The root is the primary source of many herbal
preparations. The root becomes very soft with chewing and tastes sweet, with a mucilaginous
(sticky) texture. Used to relieve symptoms of arthritis, acne, dermatitis, osteoarthritis and most
frequently used as a “blood purifier.”
The CLIMAX of Our Town alludes to the biblical image of the dim mirror in I Corinthians
13:12-13, two verses from the New Testament well-know chapter on love. “For now we see in a
mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know just as I also have
been fully known. But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
(NAS translation)
Background to Our Town
Thornton Niven Wilder was born on April 17, 1897, in Madison, Wis. He graduated from Yale
University in New Haven, Conn., in 1920 and continued his studies in Rome, Italy, where he
studied archeology. He taught literature at the University of Chicago from 1930 to 1937. Among
other plays he wrote were The Skin of Our Teeth, published in 1942, and The Matchmaker,
published in 1954. The popular film Hello, Dolly! was based on the latter play. Wilder also wrote
several novels, the most famous of which is The Bridge of San Luis Rey, published in 1927.
Wilder won a Pulitzer Prize for that book and another for Our Town. Wilder died on Dec. 7,
1975, in Hamden, Conn.
.......Our Town (set in 1901; won Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1938)) is one of the most frequently
staged American plays. It is an unconventional work in that it has no scenery or props except for
tables, chairs, ladders, and a few other objects. When actors dine, they hold imaginary utensils
and eat imaginary food. When looking out an upper-story window, they stand on ladders. When
the milkman makes deliveries from his horse-drawn cart, there is no horse or cart, although the
audience may hear clip-clops or whinnies. And so goes the entire play. Playwright Thornton
Wilder presented the play in this way to force the audience to concentrate on the characters and
the themes.
Plot Summary
By Michael J. Cummings...© 2003
http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/OurTown.html
Act One: "The Daily Life"
.
.......On a dimly lit stage without scenery, the stage manager sets up tables, chairs, and a bench.
He informs the audience of the title and author of the play, as well as its setting–Grover’s
Corners, New Hampshire, just north of the Massachusetts line. The first act of the play, he says,
takes place on May 7, 1901, beginning at dawn. The town has an ethnic section, Polish town,
where mostly Catholics live. Protestants occupy the rest of the town and make up the majority of
its citizens.
.......The stage manager tells the audience that William Jennings Bryan–the populist orator who
ran three times for the U.S. presidency–once delivered a speech in Grover’s Corners.
.......The manager then points out the house of Dr. Frank Gibbs, a space occupied by a table and
chairs, as well as Mrs. Gibbs’s garden. He also shows the audience the house of Charles Webb,
editor of the Grover’s Corners Sentinel. His wife also has a garden–almost identical to that of
Mrs. Gibbs except for sunflowers flourishing in it. The stage manager next brings the audience
up to date on current activities:
.......–In a cottage in Polish town, Dr. Gibbs has just delivered the twins of a resident.
.......–In the Crowell house, Joe Junior is just getting up to deliver morning papers.
.......–At the train depot, Shorty Hawkins is flagging the 6:45 for Boston. (The audience hears a
whistle.)
.......Meanwhile, Doc Gibbs returns home while his wife, Julia, comes downstairs to cook
breakfast. The stage manager says the doctor died in 1930, some years after his wife died while
visiting her daughter Rebecca in Canton, Ohio.
.......When Joe Crowell comes by delivering newspapers, he greets and chats briefly with Doc
Gibbs. The stage manager says Joe grew up to be an outstanding scholar in high school and
college, graduating at the head of his class at MIT, but died fighting in the First World War.
.......“All that education for nothin’,” the stage manager says.
.......Milkman Howie Newsome arrives in a cart drawn by his 17-year-old horse, Bessie, and
delivers milk to Doc and Mrs. Gibbs. Mrs. Gibbs calls her children, George, 16, and Rebecca,
much younger, for breakfast.
.......In the other house, Mrs. Webb also calls for her children–Emily, a pretty girl about George’s
age, and her little brother,Wally. It’s seven o’clock. When they come down and dig into
breakfast, Mrs. Webb scolds them for eating too fast and warns Wally, who sits before an open
book studying his lessons, not to read at the table.
.......“I’d rather have my children healthy than bright,” she says. Emily declares that she is both
healthy and bright–the brightest student in her class, in fact. In the other household, Mrs. Gibbs
advises her children on how to handle their allowances. George spends too much; Rebecca
hoards her money.
.......After the children in both families leave for school, Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb exchange
pleasantries on their front porches. Mrs. Gibbs notes that a furniture dealer offered her $300 for
an old chest of drawers, a highboy. She would sell it in a minute, she says, if she could persuade
her husband to take the money and go on a vacation. He has been especially busy, what with
delivering babies and all, and needs a rest. Mrs. Gibbs herself says she would love to see Paris.
Once, she dropped a hint to the doctor, but he said such a trip would make him “discontented
with Grover’s Corners. Better let well enough alone.” His only desire is to visit battlefields of the
Civil War every two years. He is an expert on the history of the war. Mrs. Webb urges her
neighbor to sell the highboy and encourage her husband to go with her to Paris.
.......The stage manager interrupts the plot to present more information about Grover’s Corners.
With him is an expert, Professor Willard. The tweedy professor, however, provides only a longwinded, highly technical recitation of the geological and anthropological history of the town–
although, with prompting from the stage manager, Willard adds a human touch: The town now
has 2,642 residents, counting the twins just delivered by Dr. Gibbs.
.......After Willard leaves, the stage manager summons Charles Webb to provide a political and
social history of the town. Mr. Webb arrives with a bandaged finger, which he cut while slicing
and eating an apple. Webb says the town is run by a board of selectmen. Then he provides
additional information, including the political makeup of the town: 86 percent Republican, 6
percent Democrats, 4 percent Socialists; “the rest indifferent.” Religiously, 85 percent Protestant,
12 percent Catholic; “the rest indifferent.”
.......Grover’s Corners, it is clear by now, is a typical American town–humdrum and ordinary in
every way. No one from the town ever went on to fame and fortune. But its residents seem to
like it. Ninety-percent of the high-school graduates remain in Grover’s Corners to settle down
and raise families.
.......In the afternoon, the townspeople go about their dull, ordinary business–whether shopping at
local stores or mowing lawns. When Emily and George return from school, he compliments her
on a speech she made in class about the Louisiana Purchase and leaves for the baseball field. He
is an outstanding player with extraordinary skills. Emily then sits down to chat with Mrs. Webb.
She asks her mother whether she is pretty enough to attract boys. Her mother says she is but
becomes annoyed when Emily presses her further on this question.
.......The stage manager returns to center stage to announce that a new bank is under construction.
It will be operated by the same family that owns the local blanket factory, the Cartwrights. He
believes it would be a good idea to place a time capsule in the cornerstone of the bank. If he had
his way, the capsule would contain a copy of The Sentinel, The New York Times, the U.S.
Constitution, the Bible, Shakespeare’s works, and the text of the play he is participating in, Our
Town. The time capsule will enable people "a thousand years from now [to] know a few simple
facts about us," the stage manager explains.
.......In the evening, the choir at the Congregationalist church practices under the direction of
Simon Stimford playing the organ. He stops playing and interrupts the singing of "Blessed Be
the Tie That Binds" to scold the choir. The members are singing too loudly; they need to soften
their voices. He keeps browbeating them until they lower their voices sufficiently.
.......On their way home from practice, Mrs. Gibbs, Mrs. Webb, and another choir member–Mrs.
Louella Soames–enjoy the moonlit night and smell the flowers. Mrs. Soames, however, criticizes
Stimford for his drinking. He is an alcoholic.
.......At the Gibbs and Webb homes, Emily and George converse through open upstairs windows.
The moonshine is remarkable, Emily says. George asks Emily for help with algebra; there is one
problem: He just can’t get. It would be wrong for her to give him the answer outright, they both
realize. That would be cheating. But she coaches him with obvious clues that lead him to the
solution.
.......The first act ends with George and his sister, Rebecca, sitting at the window, looking out
upon the sky and pondering the meaning of the universe.
Characters
The Stage Manager He sets up the stage, introduces the play, describes the setting, provides background
information during the play, and sometimes steps into scenes to talk with the characters. In some ways, he resembles
the chorus of an ancient Greek play or the omniscient narrator of a novel.
Charles Webb Editor of the Grover's Corners Sentinel and father of two children, Emily and Wally.
Myrtle Webb Devoted wife of Charles Webb.
Emily Webb Intelligent, pretty, engaging daughter of Charles and Myrtle Webb. She marries a next-door neighbor,
George Gibbs, but dies nine years into her marriage while giving birth to her second child.
Wally Webb Little brother of Emily. He dies after his appendix ruptures.
Frank Gibbs Hard-working town physician who goes out to tend to his patients at all hours. At the beginning of the
play, he arrives home after just delivering the twins of a woman in Polish town, a section of Grover's Corners.
Julia Gibbs Devoted wife of Dr. Gibbs. She dreams of visiting Paris with her husband but never gets the chance.
George Gibbs Upright son of Frank and Julia Gibbs. He is a star baseball player who has always loved Emily
Webb. When she dies, he is broken-hearted.
Rebecca Gibbs Little sister of George.
Howie Newsome Milkman who makes deliveries from a cart drawn by his old horse Bessie.
Joe Crowell Newspaper boy who became an outstanding student in high school and later at MIT but died in World
War I.
Si Crowell Joe's younger brother. He takes over his brother's paper route.
Sam Craig Emily Webb's cousin. He went west to pursue his career but returns for Emily's funeral.
Joe Stoddard Undertaker in charge of Emily Webb's funeral.
Bill Warren Constable who keeps law and order and once rescued a man from a snowdrift. Professor Willard
Expert on the geological and anthropological background of Grover's Corners. He helps the stage manager describe
the town and its history to the audience.
Simon Stimson He is the choirmaster at the Congregationalist church and the town alcoholic. He commits suicide.
Louella Soames Choir member and friend of Myrtle Webb and Julia Gibbs. She criticizes Simon Stimson for his
drinking.
Awake and Sing! by Clifford Odets is indeed “an American document. That is what I
meant at the outset in asserting that the play and its historic 1935 Group Theatre premier are
defining moments in American theatre. This splendid play and the superb players that first made
it live merit one distinction more: They are icons in the treasure house of 350 years of American
Jewish culture. These characters arouse our interest and sympathy despite the fact that they are
far from completely admirable. Odets was not in the least concerned with what is “good for the
Jews.” He was one of the earliest with the courage to dramatize instead what is true. In Awake
and Sing! Myron Berger, the well-intentioned father and husband, lives in the idyllic past or a
future filled with hair restoratives and winning sweepstake tickets. Because Bessie understands
that “here without a dollar you don’t look the world in the eye, “she makes tough decisions that
work, but infuriate her, inciting a rage that she nastily vents on her father. Bessie coldly opposes
her son’s romance in part because the family needs his $12 a week, but mostly because she
knows he’s not ready yet to make lifetime commitments. She forces her daughter, pregnant by a
traveling salesman, to marry a gentle greenhorn whose strongest asset is his capacity to love
people who don’t love him back. That daughter, Hennie, eventually leaves her husband and baby
and runs off with Moe, a petty racketeer who lost a leg in the war.
Introduction to Awake and Sing by Clifford Odets
http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1938/1938fr.html
Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing and the Dawn of American Jewish Theater
By Ellen Schiff
Ellen Schiff has been writing about the depiction of Jews and Jewish life on the stage since the
1982 publication of the now classic, From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contemporary
Drama. Her articles and essays have appeared in dozens of encyclopedias and reference books,
as well as in newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, Modern Drama, and
American Jewish History.
Over the past decade, Schiff has edited three collections of classic and modern American Jewish
plays. Now something of a serial anthologist, she is the co-editor of the forthcoming Nine New
Jewish Plays, a collection of works that have won a New Play Commisssion in Jewish Theatre
from the National Foundation of Jewish Culture and been developed through full production.
She and her co-editor, Michael Posnick, are longtime jurors of the New Play Commissions; they
are also collaborating on updating the NFJC’s catalog, Plays of Jewish Interest, an on-line
resource. An advisor to the Jewish Theatre of Austria and Editorial Board Member of All
About Jewish Theatre. Schiff is a veteran member of the Association for Jewish Theatre. She
lectures widely at academic and professional conferences and for general audiences who share
her passion for drama and the theatre. She lives in New York. e-mail : EFSCHIFF@aol.com
This quintessentially American Jewish play presents an accurate, sometimes harrowing
portrait of Depression-era life. The play was the centerpiece of the legendary 1935 season
of The Group Theatre, a major player in national theater history. Examination of this play
evidences the influence of 1930s theater on subsequent drama in America; the play is also
an index of how Jews perceived America and how America perceived Jews.
The year is 1939. The world is a turbulent place. One December evening you stop at your
favorite newsstand for a copy of Time magazine (.15!). On the cover is Time’s Man of the Year,
telephone and typewriter at the ready. With his amiable smile and clean white shirt, he hardly
looks like a rabble-rouser. But that is exactly what he is famous for. Playwright Clifford Odets
was the very voice of revolutionary theatre. Three years earlier, Odets had burst onto the scene
with five groundbreaking plays. Among them was Awake and Sing!, the masterwork you’re
going to hear more about tonight. Nobody, not even the man himself, could have predicted his
meteoric success. Only a curious twist of circumstances prompted the debut of Awake and Sing!,
a play the now legendary Group Theatre flatly rejected several times. Their change of heart was
providential. Today we recognize both The Group’s 1935 production and Odets’ quintessential
American Jewish play as defining moments in American theatre. I’m here to tell you how it all
came about.
But let’s begin with the playwright and his unusual name, Odets. O’Neill, O’Hara, O’Toole
yes, but Odets? It’s a name you can have fun with, and people did. Cole Porter worked it into a
lyric, rhyming it with “regrets.” When Walter Winchell saw Awake and Sing!; he trumpeted,
“Bravodets.” And the playwright’s first film script, a big disappointment, inspired critic Frank
Nugent to inquire acidly, “Odets, where is thy sting?”
Odets turns out to be a shortened form of Gorodetsky, which translates from the Russian as
“urban man.” That is not a bad way to think of the writer who will be hailed as “the Jesus of the
proletariat,” and the “poet of the middle class.” With his extraordinary multiple accomplishments
in 1935, he was declared--in the politically incorrect phrase of the time--the White Hope of the
American theatre. His coronation as Time magazine’s man of the year was no fluke. His media
attention was so heavy and frequent, there was a joke about the New York Times needing an
Odets editor. So it’s a good idea, as one of his biographers observes, to separate the man from
the myth.
Odets was born in Philadelphia in 1906 to a 19-year-old Austrian mother and a 20 year-old
Russian father, the first of three children and the only son. His father, Louis, a determined
individual, moved the family to the Bronx, then back to Philadelphia, on the way to success in
advertising. Odets’ mother, Pearl, was shy, stubborn, melancholy and given to self-pity, traits
that she seems to have passed on to her son, (Brenman-Gibson, 19), who will repeatedly try to
kill himself.
Clifford was not much of a student. He left high school in his junior year and did odd jobs,
gravitating toward radio and theatre work. He was an announcer for a small station in the Bronx.
He read poetry on the air, calling himself the Roving Reciter. He wrote two radio plays and
played the lead in one of them. A music lover, he laid claim to being the first disc jockey, albeit
that his taste ran to Beethoven with whom he identified all his life. He would have loved to make
his mark as a composer; fortunately, he recognized his lack of talent in time, and pursued a
competing ambition to be an actor. In a more confident moment later in life, he remarked that
that decision cost the world of music a great composer.
His acting ability was modest, but he persevered. He had a number of small roles for a stock
company, of which the most important may have been understudying Spencer Tracy in the lead
of Conflict, a Broadway play which had 37 performances, none of which Tracy missed. This will
happen to Odets again, more memorably. Although he didn’t get to go on for Tracy, the Conflict
connection led to an even more auspicious opportunity. He was introduced to the Theatre Guild,
a first rate, innovative producing company devoted to distinguished plays and high production
standards. The Guild assessed Odets’ talent as an actor and promptly cast him in a road company
as a robot. Odets will spend ten years as an actor, an experience that will serve him well as a
dramatist. His association with the Theatre Guild is critical because, as you will see, it put him in
exactly the right place at precisely the right moment.
The Theatre Guild (Group Theatre), which had been operating for about ten years when Odets
joined it in 1929, was a major cultivating force in the blossoming of the American theatre. You
see, our national theatre came of age as the result of several intertwining influences. For the next
few minutes I’m going to lead you through a retrospective glance at what was going on generally
in theatre in the 1920s and ‘30s. I want you to see the context in which Clifford Odets made his
mark. My goal is to heighten your appreciation of Odets’ achievement in its own time as well as
in ours.
When we think of the American stage in the early decades of the 20th century, it’s vaudeville
and spectacular revues like the Ziegfeld Follies and the George White Scandals that come to
mind. But at the same time, more serious things were going on. The American theatre in the 19teens, ‘20s and ‘30s throbbed with vigor and invention. Almost all of it was generated by the
non-commercial producing companies that proliferated in these years. The liveliest and most
enduring of them all was the Theatre Guild. As a vanguard art or not-for-profit house, the Guild
represented on these shores the revolutionary movements that had just transformed the European
stage. In the theatre of those days, the weather moved from east to west.
At the end of the 19th century and in the first decade of the 20th, a successive torrent of
innovations forever altered almost every aspect of performance, production and playwriting.
Let’s take a very basic example. Today when we see all sorts of computer-generated special
effects in the theatre—like a flying villain-catching car or a snowstorm blanketing the
audience—it’s easy to forget that there was a time B.C.—before computers—and even B.E.—
before electric power. The first power plant in the world was built in New York in 1881-82.
Think what a difference that made! The availability of electricity was one of many things that
enabled producers, designers and actors to use the stage in unprecedented ways.
A second major influence reshaping the stage was a sea change in attitudes and orientations.
The prevailing concept of theatre as a place for fashionable amusements or a showcase for the
exaggerated gestures and artificial speech of matinee idols became obsolete. Modern theatre
makers believed that the stage should speak to and about the audience. Whether that was
accomplished realistically or poetically, a theatre experience ought to connect people on both
sides of the footlights.
Visionaries producers like Konstantin Stanislavsky in Russia, Jacques Copeau in France and
Max Reinhardt in Germany were not alone in this conviction. It was shared by the era’s
playwrights who dramatized social changes, ideological conflicts and universal human
experiences, and for the first time, depicted them in the lives of ordinary people. In the golden
age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, an extraordinary number of original talents
were writing literature for the stage. Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Gorki, Hauptmann, and G. B.
Shaw, figured among the pioneers who plowed new ground in two ways: they practiced
playwriting as a literary art and they reshaped drama to the measure of their vastly changing
societies.
You know that theatre in virtually every country in the Western world, except for the United
States, receives substantial government support—and with it, traditionally, government
oversight. In England, for example, until 1968 the Lord Chamberlain’s office controlled what got
onto the stage by requiring the licensing of plays (that’s the origin of the term “legitimate
theatre”). The new plays predictably ran afoul of government watchdogs since they often turned
a critical eye on entrenched institutions, social inequities, and conventions of every sort, and
challenged prevailing mores and morality. But theatre people are ingenious. To do an end run
around the censors, mount the new plays, and try out original stagecraft, independent theatre
companies, sometimes called art or little theatres, sprang up in England and on the continent.
Because they derived their income from subscribers and individual donors, they were free from
government monitoring and free too to produce iconoclastic works like Ibsen’s Ghosts and
Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata.
Their unconventional productions frequently transgressed proprieties. In 1902, an actor in
John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World referred to “a drift of chosen females
standing in their shifts.” The line set off a riot in the audience and a weeklong protest in the
streets of Dublin. Theatregoers were shocked, shocked to hear women’s undergarments
mentioned in public. Audiences in those inventive years were also likely to see sights they
weren’t accustomed to at all--like actors doing an entire scene with their backs to the audience—
or to odors they didn’t expect, like sides of beef hung on stage in a play set in a butcher shop.
The excitement generated by the independent theatres was highly communicable. It crossed the
Atlantic in the touring visits of Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre and in Max Reinhardt
productions. Pioneer American producer Harold Clurman studied the revolutionary stage
techniques of Jacques Copeau in Paris. Actor-producer Lee Strasberg learned Stanislavsky’s
famous Method Acting from Russian actors who taught in New York (there’s the seed of our
famous Actors’ Studio). The great Russian himself came here with his company in 1923. Across
America, in the shadow of commercial theatre, then as now, slick and convention-bound, the
spirit and practices of the independents blossomed, inspired by their European models.
This was the energized climate in which America’s earliest great dramatist, Eugene O’Neill,
wrote his first plays. (As did Elmer Rice, who would become the first Jew to win the Pulitzer for
drama, in 1929 for Street Scene.) The new theatres strove to separate the art of theatre from its
commodification. (Their contemporary heirs are the not-for-profits: off- and off-off Broadway,
regional and university theatres.) But it was not censorship the non-profit theatres were avoiding,
it was commercialism. There is a reason that in this country, “theatre” is often called “show
business.”
Now this is where you came into all this theatre history. In the’20s and ‘30s, arguably the most
influential non-commercial producing company in America was the aforementioned Theatre
Guild. It operated from 1919 until mid-century and served as a training ground for every aspect
of play production. The Guild staged the new plays from abroad with happy results: The
domestication of foreign drama and dramaturgy in turn stimulated the emergence of a distinctly
American theatre. The Theatre Guild introduced plays that have become classics of the American
repertoire like O’Neill’s Strange Interlude (1928), and Dorothy and Debose Heywards’ Porgy
(1927), which, with a little help from George and Ira Gershwin, became Porgy and Bess in 1935,
and Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted (1924), which Frank Loesser turned into
The Most Happy Fella in 1956.
Then the shock wave that shook the world registered on stage--the crash of 1929. The
noncommercial theatre adopted a new mission: to serve as a forum. The emphasis shifted to the
dramatic statement, which was contemporaneous social comment and frequently, protest. While
audiences at Broadway and mainstream theatres continued to see drama that bore little relevance
to the world outside, an impassioned generation of American playwrights and producing
companies made social and political drama their signature. Writers like Maxwell Anderson,
Lillian Hellman, Elmer Rice, and Robert Sherwood moved drama out of elegant drawing rooms
to scenes much more familiar and relevant to theatregoers. As the Depression deepened and the
threat of fascism grew, producing companies and playwrights, earnest about addressing the
issues of the day, took an unambiguous turn to the left.
The writers, artists, and intellectuals of the twenties and thirties whom the HUAC would at
mid-century brand as radicals were genuinely devoted to exposing the failure of capitalism, yes,
but even more to concern and solidarity with its victims. They deplored the plight of the
downtrodden oppressed by big business, racism, bigotry and exploitation. They demanded a new
world of equal opportunity and they truly believed in its possibility. This was a time when
“literature was a weapon and leftist optimism was almost mandatory” (Weales 15).
In these heady between-the-war decades of immigrants and flappers, bootleggers and
breadlines, the American theatre came of age. That accomplishment bears countless Jewish
fingerprints, for by the 1920s Jews were deeply involved in all theatre-related activities. Already
sensitive to the ethics of community responsibility, they were pulled to the left in the ‘30s by the
dire effects of hard times, the spread of fascism, and the growing threat to their European coreligionists.
All of these threads we’ve been following— innovations in every aspect of playwriting and
production, the emergence of independent theatres, and a distinctly American, socially-oriented
theatre with its prominent Jewish component—are evident in the developments we now see
spooling out of the Theatre Guild.
In the ranks of the Guild were three young people, two of them Jewish, who were impassioned
by the European vanguard’s novel approaches to acting and staging and their commitment to
social comment. On fire with revolutionary spirit, Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl
Crawford “envisioned a theatre as a collective…a gathering of individuals whose plays,
artistically and socially, reflected their sense of community, and reached out to touch, to change,
to mold the greater society of which both they and their audiences were part” (Weales, 28).
At first Clurman, Strasberg and Crawford (the latter two will become prime forces in the
Actors’ Studio) tried to establish a studio theatre under the wing of the Theatre Guild. They soon
realized that their vision and political goals demanded a separate entity. In 1931, they broke
away from the Guild to form their own producing company whose very name—The Group
Theatre—declared their politics.
The Group was firmly rooted in the concept of community both in its mission and in its
structure as an ensemble repertory company. It believed that the function of theatre was to
address American life and American character and to engage the audience by dramatizing, from
a distinctly proletarian viewpoint, concerns that were central to theatergoers’ lives. To
accomplish these goals, they adopted Stanislavsky’s method of “affective memory”—a
technique that depends on the actors’ engaging emotional truth and using their bodies and voices
naturally. Whatever the subsequent successes of Group productions, the quality of the acting
won legendary esteem--I have only to mention some of The Group Theatre’s actors: Jules (later
John) Garfield, Stella Adler, Luther Adler, Morris Carnovsky, J. E. Bromberg, Sanford Meisner,
and Franchot Tone.
When Strasberg, Clurman and Crawford left the Theatre Guild, they took many of these
players with them. They also invited a 25-year-old actor named Clifford Odets. It’s not clear
exactly what the Group saw in Odets, for he had hardly distinguished himself as an actor. Still,
they must have recognized some sort of incipient talent. Stella Adler is said to have cautioned
Odets, “Honestly, Clifford, unless you turn out to be a genius, no one will ever speak to you”
(Weales 30).
On the other hand, Odets’ attraction to the Group is much more easily explained. He had spent
most of the last ten years in the theatre and was utterly captivated by it. There were personal
reasons too: He had a stormy relationship with his father, who once expressed his opinion of
Clifford’s chosen profession by smashing his typewriter. Odets was a moody, depressed fellow;
by the time he was twenty-five, he had tried to commit suicide three times. He was looking for
sanctuary and The Group, which billed its players alphabetically, paid them equally (if it paid
them at all), and lived in communal poverty, held out the promise of a home. Odets wrote in the
Group’s public diary, “I who cried from my inverted wilderness for strong roots … have found
them at last in The Group. I am passionate about this thing!!!” (Brenman-Gibson, 193).
One of the Group Theatre’s first productions was John Howard Lawson’s Success Story
(1931). It tells the tale of an immigrant Jew whose ambitions overcome his scruples and drive
him to claw his way to the top, paving his own undoing. It is a plum role for an actor and it went
to Luther Adler, who won critical raves. Adler’s understudy was Clifford Odets. While he moped
about, dying for his big chance, Odets poured his family and professional frustrations into a play
about three generations of a Jewish family coping with Depression woes and intergenerational
warfare. He called his work, “I Got the Blues.” A few years later, he would tell the New York
World Telegram, “I was sore; that’s why I wrote that play…Stuffed in a room waiting for Luther
Adler to perish so I might get a chance at playing his part in Success Story.” Adler, by the way,
was then about thirty and he never missed a performance.
Odets submitted “Blues” to his Group Theatre colleagues. They turned it down, objecting to
its “messy kitchen realism,” “some rather gross Jewish humor,” and a “cruel Jewish mother.”
Nonetheless, during the summer of 1933, The Group played the second act of “Blues” at Green
Mansions, an adult resort. Heartened by its enthusiastic reception there, Odets renewed his
appeal for a New York production. Lee Strasberg dashed his hopes, “You don’t understand,
Cliff. We don’t like your play.”
Someone did, however. The play was optioned for production by a Frank Merlin who had the
financial backing, but lacked something even more critical—the players. Odets had written the
roles for The Group Theatre members. They were irreplaceable. Merlin had to drop the project.
Meantime, The Group was on the verge of closing, desperate for suitable material. The actors
themselves were frantically reading scripts. When Odets, whose play had once again been
rejected, quietly said that the Theatre Guild was interested in it, his colleagues agreed to listen to
him read the work. He had done major revisions and “I Got the Blues” now bore a new title,
drawn from a verse in Isaiah. It was called Awake and Sing!
As Odets was reading the third act for his performer colleagues, Strasberg, Clurman and
Crawford came into the room and immediately sensed the excitement. “This is the play we’re
going to do,” exulted Luther Adler (Brenman-Gibson 312). By the end of 1934, Awake and
Sing! was in rehearsal. Then Odets’ fortunes took an even more dramatic turn.
He had joined the Communist Party. He belonged to a unit whose task was “providing
entertainment for the meetings and rallies of front organizations and unions” (Weales 36).
Whether Odets was serving the cause or aiming for a $50 prize two Marxist journals were
offering for a new revolutionary play or looking to burnish the name of the Group Theatre, he
wrote in three nights a one-act called Waiting For Lefty, the story of a taxi drivers’ strike. Its
premier on January 5, 1935, made theatre history. The audience, which identified immediately
and completely with the play, spontaneously joined in the finale, shouting, “Strike! Strike!”
Their shouts and stomping and frenzied applause almost tore the house down. The twenty-eight
curtain calls lasted almost as long as the production. When Lefty was repeated a week later, the
Fifth Avenue Theatre was packed with standees and again theatergoers were worked up to an
impassioned response. Lefty had found its moment—and its audiences. It swept the country,
playing in 104 cities in eight months (Weales, 39), banned in seven cities, inciting noisy crowds
and provoking frequent wholesale arrests by authorities trying to censor what they perceived as
Communist propaganda. Indeed, Lefty has since come to be known as the perfect agitprop play;
it has been produced all over the world.
So when Awake and Sing! opened six weeks later, on February 19, 1935, the Group billed it as
“a new play by the author of Waiting for Lefty.” The reviews were mixed. For instance, Brooks
Atkinson of the New York Times wrote, “Mr. Odets has gone deep into the hearts and minds of
his tormented people. He has a rare sense of the loneliness of the individual. Although [his
characters] share meals, living space and meager funds…the intensity of their feeling makes
individuals of each one of them…” By contrast, Robert Garland in the New York World
Telegram was of the opinion that, “Awake and Sing! would be a better drama…if its hot and
half-baked protagonist didn’t bang his books on the table and swear to read the revolution into
being.” Curiously, the leftwing press gave the play its chilliest reception. The Daily Worker
dismissed it as, “a step backward for Odets.”(He will leave the Party before year’s end).
Abraham Cahan at the Jewish Daily Forward proclaimed the play “one of the most important
happenings in the life of the American Theatre” (Brenman-Gibson 326). Awake and Sing!’s
initial run was a respectable if not exceptional 174 performances.
Awake and Sing! premiered on February 19. Barely a month later, on March 26, The Group
Theatre mounted Waiting for Lefty on a double bill with another one act, Till the Day I Die. This
play is based on a supposedly true story about a German Communist arrested for underground
work. While no masterpiece, it is one of the earliest American anti-Nazi scripts, So now Odets
had three plays running end to end. And before 1935 was over, there would be two more. In May
came Morris Carnovsky in I Can’t Sleep, a monologue delivered by a worker anguished that he
has betrayed the Party. And on December 9th, The Group introduced Paradise Lost, a second
Jewish family play. Unfortunately, Paradise Lost was aptly titled; it met a hostile reception. Two
months later, Odets headed off to a $2500 a week job in Hollywood.
Like his stage characters, Odets was complex and often at war with himself. He was a fervent
egalitarian who enjoyed the pleasures of privilege. In his publicity pictures he is well groomed;
he is often shown sporting a fine overcoat and a cashmere scarf. Forever after his sensational
success and unexpected failure in the theatre, Odets vascillated between the competing lures of
matinees and Mammon. He spent the rest of his professional life travelling back and forth
between Broadway and Hollywood. However, he never lost his idealism or his belief in
perfectibility.
But even if Odets never wrote another play—he did, six more—his 1935 accomplishments (I
have spoken only of those in the theatre) distinguish him as an authoritative and influential force
in American theatre. He captured the idiom and the nature of a whole stratum of his society.
Gerald Weales is absolutely correct in claiming that,“Awake and Sing! “became the play that
most reflected that period’s inchoate longing for personal and political triumph” (Weales 10708).
While Odets’ plays fall short of the quality of the modern European classics or his countryman
Eugene O’Neill’s, his role in changing the direction of the American theatre arguably can be
compared to Shaw’s in England and Ibsen’s, Strindberg’s, Chekhov’s and Gorki’s on the
continent. Happily, his achievement was recognized in his own time. Odets was acclaimed as
“the voice of the thirties.” Numerous critics and magazines plumped for him to win the Pulitzer
Prize (he did not). Theatre companies were formed all over the country expressly to mount Lefty,
Till The Day I Die and Awake and Sing!, and before 1935 was over, Awake and Sing! had gone
on to Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland and Newark. It was done in Hungarian and in Yiddish.
When The Group revived it four years later in 1939, critics saw its immense achievement and
gave it what Clurman termed, “the reception of an honored classic.”
And so it is. It deserves that reputation for many reasons. For me, its excellence lies in three
elements: the characters, the language of the play, and the authenticity with which it represents
its milieu, a Depression-era American Jewish urban household. Because Odets was writing for
the egalitarian Group Theatre, he gave the characterizations equal richness and uncommon depth.
I don’t know of any other playwright who has taken the trouble to provide the actor and reader so
vivid a description of each of the nine dramatis personae, “all of whom,” he writes, “share a
fundamental activity, a struggle for life amidst petty conditions.”
Here are a couple of examples: First, some of the lines that introduce the mother: “Bessie
Berger, as she herself states, is not only the mother in this home but also the father….She knows
that when one lives in the jungle one must look out for the wild life.” And here is Bessie’s
husband: “Myron…is a born follower….Life is an even sweet event to him, but the ‘old days’
were sweeter yet….He has a dignified sense of himself….He likes everything. But he is
heartbroken without being aware of it.”
There is a perverse sign of the excellence of the fresh and dimensional characters Odets put on
stage: they were quickly imitated and entered popular culture flattened and stereotyped. But you
cannot get Bessie Berger mixed up with the Jewish mother of so many movies and sitcoms. For
those of you who remember Gertrude Berg’s long-running show “The Goldbergs” (which, on
radio, predated Awake and Sing!), Odets’ Bessie is definitely not Molly Goldberg.
The vigor with which Odets’ characters cross the footlights springs from their crisp, pungent
speech. It rings genuine. It’s apparent that these people know one another so well, they can
converse in non-sequiturs and still express their feelings. For example, when the Bergers’
spirited nubile daughter Hennie announces, “From now on I’m planning to stay in nights,” her
mother Bessie asks, “What’s the matter, a bedbug bit you suddenly?”—a question that ultimately
reveals, by Bessie’s choice of “bedbug” that she’s onto something before she’s even aware of it
herself. Or again, when the Bergers’ friend Moe Axelrod is asked to explain something he’s just
said, he cracks, “You ain’t sunburnt—you heard me.” Odets has been compared with Chekhov
for his flair in making characters reveal themselves by the “distance between what they say and
what they really say” (Weales 81). In an exchange between the two warring lovers, Moe calls
Hennie “Lousy,” “as if,” writes Odets in the stage direction, “saying ‘I love you.’” Frustrated not
to find Hennie home when he’s come to call, Moe complains, “What kind of a house is this ain’t
got an orange in it.” My personal favorite line comes from sweet, ineffectual Myron Berger: “My
scalp is impoverished,” he laments.
The unprecedented verisimilitude of the play and its representative characters made heads nod
with recognition. An especially vivid account comes from the writer and critic Alfred Kazin,
who watched the play from “high up in the second balcony of the Belasco Theatre.” “Everybody
on that stage,” wrote Kazin, “was furious, kicking, alive—the words, always real but never flat,
brilliantly authentic like no other theatre speech on Broadway, aroused the audience to such
delight that one could feel it bounding back and uniting itself with the mind of the
writer….Watching my mother and father and uncles and aunts occupying the stage in Awake and
Sing! by as much right as if they were Hamlet and Lear, I understood at last…Art and truth and
hope could yet come together—if a real writer was their meeting place….I had never seen actors
on the stage and an audience in the theatre come together with such a happy shock” (BrenmanGibson 324).
I do not mean to suggest that the characters’ interactions in Awake and Sing! overpower the
play’s political statement. That begins with the title, drawn from Isaiah, “Awake and sing, ye that
dwell in the dust…” The very first line is its young protagonist Ralph’s complaint, “Where’s
advancement down at the place?” As avid as Ralph is for a “chance to get to first base,” he
knows that he does not want a “life…printed on dollar bills.” Ralph is a ready student of his
Marx-quoting grandfather, Jacob, who urges him, “Boychick, wake up! Be something. Make
your life something good” and, “Boys like you could fix it someday. Look on the world, not on
yourself so much. Every country is with starving millions. In Germany and Poland a Jew
couldn’t walk on the street. Everybody hates, nobody loves.” Against the Ralph-Jacob alignment,
Odets pits the formidable Bessie Berger. Bessie has no choice but to give her family what they
need, not what they want or what she might like to give, “Here,” she says about life in America,
“Here without a dollar you don’t look the world in the eye.” The nearest this proletarian play
comes to an on-stage villain is Bessie’s fat-cat brother, Morty. A smug and self-centered dress
manufacturer, Morty’s tag line is, “I’m a great boy to live and let live.”
Awake and Sing! has proven itself impervious to the passage of time. Its power to touch
audiences deeply is undiminished; the voices of its characters remain strong and moving. But it
is not just audiences whom Clifford Odets makes awake and sing. His influence is manifest in
subsequent American plays. William Gibson remarked that in the late ‘30s, Odets was the
playwright most of his generation wanted to be. Among the many dramatists who cite him as
their forefather are Arthur Miller, David Mamet, Tony Kushner, and Donald Margulies. Odets
popularized, though he did not invent, the social realism that still dominates our theatre. Without
the forcefulness of Odets’ proletarian characters, for example, it is inconceivable that Arthur
Miller would have been able to argue convincingly the case for the common man as tragic hero.
Odets helped bring a staple of the Western theatre, the clash of fathers and sons, to Englishspeaking America, where the struggle turns into the rebellion of New World children against Old
World parents in a society full of promise, but short of certitudes.
Finally, there is no underestimating the Odetsian impact on American Jewish playwriting.
Odets’ plays “translate the Yiddish theatre’s leftist passion for social reform into an English with
Yiddish inflections,” writes Nahma Sandrow (Sandrow 283). His characters are unmistakably
and unapologetically Jewish Americans, eager to get on or get ahead. All three generations in
Awake and Sing! scramble to reconcile tradition with new and unaccustomed opportunities, to
juggle idealism and pragmatism, family well-being with individual fulfillment.
These characters arouse our interest and sympathy despite the fact that they are far from
completely admirable. Odets was not in the least concerned with what is “good for the Jews.” He
was one of the earliest with the courage to dramatize instead what is true. In Awake and Sing!
Myron Berger, the well-intentioned father and husband, lives in the idyllic past or a future filled
with hair restoratives and winning sweepstake tickets. Because Bessie understands that “here
without a dollar you don’t look the world in the eye, “she makes tough decisions that work, but
infuriate her, inciting a rage that she nastily vents on her father. Bessie coldly opposes her son’s
romance in part because the family needs his $12 a week, but mostly because she knows he’s not
ready yet to make lifetime commitments. She forces her daughter, pregnant by a traveling
salesman, to marry a gentle greenhorn whose strongest asset is his capacity to love people who
don’t love him back. That daughter, Hennie, eventually leaves her husband and baby and runs off
with Moe, a petty racketeer who lost a leg in the war.
Odets’ complex, deeply flawed characters made room on the American stage for subsequent
blameworthy, genuinely Jewish characters: Miller’s self-hating Jew in Broken Glass, David
Mamet’s Hollywood hucksters in Speed-the-Plow, Tony Kushner’s detestable Roy Cohen in
Angels in America, Jerry Sterner’s arrogant takeover artist, Larry “the Liquidator” Garfinkle in
Other People’s Money, and Daniel Goldfarb’s whiny, meddlesome jewelry merchant in Modern
Orthodox, to name a fews. The authenticity of Odets’ Jewish characters, in common with their
situations, is distinctively American—so much so that Harold Clurman noted that for Israelis,
Awake and Sing! seemed much more American than Jewish.
Awake and Sing! is frequently revived, inspiring reviews that demonstrate its enduring capacity
to delight and provoke audiences. In 1992, commenting on the Chicago Steppenwolf production,
John Lahr wrote in The New Yorker that Odets’ “plays…despite their ideological full dress, are
a quirky blend of Jewish pessimism and a very American desire to shine….The peculiar paradox
of ‘Awake and Sing’ …is that it celebrates both the dream and the sure knowledge that a dream
is something you wake up from” (Lahr 122). Reviewing the 1976 production at Princeton’s
McCarter Theatre, Clive Barnes wrote in the New York Times, “Odets plays on the emotions
like a mighty Wurlitzer emerging with lights into an Art Deco auditorium” Then Barnes added,
“his is a play that quite clearly the author believed in. It is that quality of belief that transformed
it into an American document.”
Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing!” is indeed “an American document. That is what I meant at
the outset in asserting that the play and its historic 1935 Group Theatre premier are defining
moments in American theatre. This splendid play and the superb players that first made it live
merit one distinction more: They are icons in the treasure house of 350 years of American Jewish
culture.
WORKS CITED AND FOR FURTHER READING
Brenman-Gibson, Margaret. Clifford Odets: American Playwright. New York: Atheneum, 1982.
Clurman, Harold. The Fervent Years. New York: Hill & Wang, 1945.
Lahr, John. “Waiting For Odets,” The New Yorker. October 16, 1992.
Odets, Clifford. Awake and Sing! Awake and Singing: Six Great American Jewish Plays, Ellen
Schiff, ed. New York: Applause Theatre Books, 2004.
Rabkin, Gerald. Drama and Commitment: Politics In the American Theatre of the Thirties. New
York: Haskell House, 1973.
Sandrow, Nahma. Vagabond Stars. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
Weales, Gerald. Odets the Playwright. London and New York: Methuen, 1985.
Background for Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill
What is the significance of the celebration in the play?
Two celebrations occur in the course of the play. The first is Hope's birthday party in Act II, the
occasion for Hickey's visit, and the second is the "second birthday party" that closes the play.
One predicts the cast's ruin, and the other makes reparations. The first shows the characters as
they begin to crumble under the weight of Hickey's gospel: each miserably pledges to act on
their pipe dreams and almost come to blows with anyone who might deride their plans.
Foreshadowing their imminent falls, this celebration takes on an ominously prophetic function.
Cyrus Day argues that the party evokes the Last Supper. Key correspondences include the twelve
disciples of Hickey, the three women, the presence of Parritt as a suicidal Judas figure, the wine
drinking, and the midnight hour. For Day, Hickey becomes a sort of "Anti-Christ," foretelling an
apocalypse to come.
Larry identifies the feast's prophetic function in jesting that he is the divine hand from the feast
of Belshazzar. Here he refers to a story from the Book of Daniel (5: 1–6, 25–8). Belshazzar,
King of Babylon, gives a banquet for his nobles, blasphemously serving wine in the sacred
vessels his father Nebuchadnezzar had looted from the Temple in Jerusalem. During the banquet,
a divine hand appears and writes a prophecy on the wall a phrase only the prophet Daniel can
decipher. It reads as follows: "God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an
end; you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting…" That very night Belshazzar is
slain. Hickey's judgment similarly predicts ruin for the drunken guests.
The second party takes place after Hickey's arrest and declaration of insanity. It is a second birth
of sorts, as the removal of Hickey enables the group to revive their pipe dreams. The group's
collective ode to Babylon that closes the play evokes the Feast of Fools, as Larry dubs it, from
before. Though Hickey has departed, the writing foretelling the group's doom grimly remains on
the wall.
Early in the play Larry quotes from Heine's poem "Death and his Brother Sleep ('Morphine')."
How might one begin to read this poem against the play?
Early in the play, Larry quotes Heine's "Death and his Brother Sleep ('Morphine')." He does so to
indicate to Parritt that, compared with the joys of Sleep and Death, it is better to have never have
been born at all. The poem, however, does not only speak to Larry's pose of cynical,
philosophical detachment but to one of the play's central motifs as well. The poem opens by
posing a "mirror likeness between those two shining, youthfully-fledged figures" of sleep and
death. The play similarly begins with this likeness. The saloon of sleeping guests is continually
described as a "morgue" and "graveyard." The pipe dreaming of its residents condemns them to a
sort of living death.
Bible references;
The play's primary symbol is the Iceman. The phrase, "The Iceman Cometh," recalls the story of
the wise and foolish virgins in Matthew 25:6 and its description of the coming of the Savior:
"But at midnight there was a cry made, Behold the bridegroom cometh." The messianic figure of
the play is certainly Hickey. In killing the fantasy of tomorrow, this messiah does not bring
salvation, however, but death. As Larry notes: "Death was the Iceman Hickey called to his
home!"
The trope of the vessel reappears significantly at Harry Hope's birthday party. There, Larry jests
that Hickey is the divine hand from the feast of Belshazzar. As told in the Book of Daniel (5: 1–
6, 25–8), Belshazzar, King of Babylon, gives a banquet for his nobles, blasphemously serving
wine in the sacred vessels his father Nebuchadnezzar had looted from the Temple in Jerusalem.
Hickey will call the party to judgment for drinking from their pipe dream vessels, bringing them
to their ruin.
Who is Belshazzar?
Belshazzar was the grandson of Nebuchadnezzar. (See Jer. 27:7)
THE HISTORICAL DILEMMA
According to Josephus, c.Ap.I.20, who was quoting from Berosus, it indicates that Nebuchadnezzar was
succeeded in the kingdom by his son Evilmerodach, who reigned badly for two years and was put to death
by Neriglissor, the husband of his sister, who then reigned for four years. Neriglissor’s son
Laborosoarchod, reigned after his father for nine months, but was murdered. His murderers elevated
Nabonnedus, one of the conspirators, to the throne. In Nabonnedus’ seventeenth year Babylon fell to the
Medes and Persians, but Nabonnedus was not killed in Babylon, he had fortified himself in Borsippa,
which Cyrus also conquered and sent Nabonnedus to Carmania where he lived out the rest of his life.
According to this and other reports there were four kings after Nebuchadnezzar
-- his son, Evilmerodach,
--his son-in-law, Neriglissor,
--his grandson (daughter’s son) Laborosoarchod,
--and the last king who, to all appearances was not related to Nebuchadnezzar, namely Nabonnedus who
was not put to death by Cyrus at the fall of Babylon.
With these facts in view, historians and critics cast great doubt on this story found in Daniel, as there
seemed to be no historical evidence of a king Belshazzar, a descendant of Nebuchadnezzar, who perished
in the Babylonian take-over.
However, in the 20th century archaeologists found a cuneiform table, called the "Persian Verse Account
of Nabonidus". Belshazzar was the son of Nabonidus. After ruling Babylon for three years (553 B.C.),
Nabonidus departed the great city and spent ten years in Tema in Arabia, during this time Nabonidus
appointed Belshazzar as the ruler of Babylon. Significantly, when the Persians conquered Babylon,
Nabonidus was not there, but Belshazzar was!
Yet, this still does not link Belshazzar to Nebuchadnezzar-- at least not through his father.
THE QUEEN MOTHER
Several commentators believe the “queen mother” which appears in Daniel 5 is Nitocris. Who is Nitocris?
She is actually quite a famous daughter of Nebuchadnezzar and most likely the mother of Belshazzar.