Cappie review of “Awake and Sing!” by Lizzie Albert, Montgomery Blair High School, Silver Spring, MD

Watching Zelda Fichandler’s Awake and Sing! is like being a fly on the wall in a Bronx apartment in 1935. The detailed set (designed by Andromache Chalfant) portrays two rooms of the Berger family's apartment and encompasses the entire stage. The two rooms are life-sized; above the “ceiling” of the apartment the set is brick, wood, and concrete, representing the outer structural context of the apartment. To exit, the actors leave the room through a curtained doorway into a hallway that is also part of the apartment. The dim yellow lamps, the shabby furniture, the solemn portraits of ancestors that adorn the wall and the abundance of detail-real silverware and china, staticky jazz music on the radio, and appropriately shabby period costumes-transport the audience back in time and provide a meticulously believable backdrop for the days we witness in the life of the Berger family.

Awake and Sing!, by Clifford Odets, is in the style of American Realism, where - rather than following a protagonist from place to place and event to event - we are given the apartment as a setting and watch what unfolds in this limited time and place. Thus the set serves an important function as an anchor for the characters. But it serves another, equally important function too - by completely encompassing the stage, not permitting the actors any awareness of the theater or the outside world, it serves as a metaphor for the desperate situation of the Bergers, who are trapped in a world of living hand-to-mouth.

The Bergers are a Jewish family attempting to survive during the Great Depression. To do so, they take in a boarder, Moe Axelrod (Adam Dannheisser), and rely heavily on the weekly paycheck of 22-year-old son Ralph (Adam Green). Ralph is restless and ambitious, certain there is more to life than the hand-to-mouth existence he is faced with. His grandfather Jacob (Robert Prosky), in a powerful and understated performance, encourages Ralph’s dreams and hopes. Jacob shares his own desires for greater meaning; his passion for opera records, and the crackle and splutter of a phonograph playing Caruso, are a poignant symbol of the higher spirit that he and Ralph dream of.

Ralph’s mother Bessie (Jana Robbins) disagrees. Tough, pragmatic, domineering and ruthless, she forces her pregnant daughter Hennie (Miriam Silverman) into marriage with a man she does not love who is not the father of her child. Her unshakeable survival instinct and the precariousness of their financial situation (represented, once again, by the set, which includes tumbled furniture strewn along the edge of the stage to symbolize the ever-present threat of eviction) often lead her to harsh words and demands that her children make sacrifices for the good of the family. Robbins gives a nuanced and wryly humorous performance that evokes sympathy for the practical motives behind Bessie’s harsh surface.

Awake and Sing! examines the difficult choices a family is forced to make in a time of extreme poverty, while exploring the relationships and culture of a New York Jewish family. The dialogue is rich with 1930s slang and flows out of the actors’ mouths believably and naturally; the author, Clifford Odets, shows a gift for representing the powerful bonds that hold a family together and the relationships between parent and child, brother and sister, and man and woman. Romantic, humorous and deeply touching, Awake and Sing! is truly an experience that transports the audience to another time and place.