THE LAB:GALLERY Presents INTERSECTION February 10-March 2, 2012
JUST SCENES – A night of scenes written by the greatest playwrights 06.06.11
Posted on 01. May, 2011 by danikadruttman in Art at Roger Smith, Arts, Events
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CLIFFORD ODETS: ABOUT Odets was born in Philadelphia to Romanian- and Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Lou Odets (born Gorodetsky) and Esther Geisinger, and raised in the Bronx, New York. He
dropped out of high school to pursue acting. He helped found the Group Theatre, a highly influential theatre company in the U.S. that utilized a new acting technique, closely associated with the thinking of the Russian master Constantin Stanislavski.
After briefly trying acting, Odets decided to become the Group Theatre’s first original playwright. At the urging of Group co-founder Harold Clurman, he wrote Awake and Sing! in 1935. Although his first play, it is often considered his masterpiece. It follows the story of a large Jewish family in New York.
Mainly due to the misgivings of Group leader Lee Strasberg, Awake and Sing! was not produced right away. Nor was his second Till the Day I Die, which was banned for its anti-Nazi sentiments. Odets’s first play to be produced was the one-act Waiting for Lefty. This is a series of interconnected scenes depicting workers for a fictional taxi company. The focus alternates between the drivers’ union meeting and vignettes from their difficult, oppressed lives. The climax is a defiant call for the union to strike. The play can be performed in any acting space, including union meeting halls and on the street. The play’s wild success brought Odets unexpected fame and fortune. In 1938 Odets wrote what is perhaps his signature work, Rocket to the Moon, about a guilt-ridden dentist, which put him on the cover of Time magazine.
Odets would soon move to Hollywood to begin writing for the screen as well as the stage. His play The Flowering Peach was the preferred choice of the Pulitzer Prize jury in 1955, but under pressure from Joseph Pulitzer Jr., the prize went instead to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which the jury considered the weakest of the five shortlisted nominees.
These plays, along with Odets’s other major Group Theatre plays of the 1930s, are harsh criticisms of profiteers and exploitative economic systems during the Great Depression. They have been dismissed by some critics as mere propaganda, but Odets asserted that all of his plays deal with the human spirit persevering in the face of all opponents, whether they be the capitalist class or not. In later years, Odets’s plays became more reflective and autobiographical, although class consciousness was ever in the background. The playwright George S. Kaufman gently tweaked him about his innocuous turn: “Odets, where is thy sting?”
Odets spent summers from 1931 to the early 1940s at Pine Brook Country Club in the countryside of Nichols, Connecticut, which was the rehearsal headquarters of the Group Theatre (New York) formed by Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford. Other artists who worked at Pine Brook were; Elia Kazan, Sanford Meisner, Luise Rainer, Harry Morgan, John Garfield, Francis Farmer, Will Geer, Lee J. Cobb, Howard Da Silva and Irwin Shaw.
In 1952, Odets was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA). He disavowed his communist affiliations and cooperated by “naming names”; as a result, he did not share the fate of many of his colleagues who were blacklisted. Odets did not provide the names of anyone who had not already been mentioned to the committee, but he later expressed guilt and “revulsion” over his testimony. Odets was reportedly tormented by his testimony until his death in 1963, and he wrote relatively little for stage or screen after his 1952 subcommittee appearance. Two notable scripts from his Hollywood years in the 1950s were The Big Knife (play and 1955 movie), and Sweet Smell of Success (movie, 1957).
In the early 1960s Odets was once again a-ferment, revising librettos for projected musical versions of Golden Boy and The Flowering Peach, and signing a lucrative contract for a dozen teleplays for NBC’s new dramatic anthology, The Richard Boone Show. Time magazine ran an article on his artistic rebirth, quoting the playwright as saying, “The American people don’t know who they are or where they’re going.” The article went on to say, ‘Clifford Odets knows where he’s going—to NBC as a television writer.” Unfortunately Odets had neglected his health in recent years and by mid-1963 was in hospital with advanced stomach and bowel cancer. He died soon after, on August 14, 1963, following many bedside visits from such movie and theater friends as Shirley MacLaine and Danny Kaye (who eventually would star in the musical version of The Flowering Peach).
Odets’s dramatic style is distinguished by a kind of poetic, metaphor-laden street talk, by his socialist politics, and by his way of dropping the audience right into the conflict with little or no introduction. Often character is more important than plot, which Odets attributed to the influence of Anton Chekhov. In general, Odets’s political statements reflect the Marxism that was common in the 1930s; he often points to the Soviet Union as an example of a perfect socialist state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Odets
