Cohan, Eugene O'Neill, Paddy Chayefsky, Edna Ferber, and
Clifford Odets were among the array of major 20th-century dramatists born of European immigrants, as were Arthur Miller and David Mamet.
Freeman most recently trod the boards in the triumphant revival of
Clifford Odets' 'The Country Girl,' directed by Mike Nichols.
The latest work to get this treatment (courtesy the New Yiddish Rep) is the
Clifford Odets classic Awake and Sing!, one of the best-known plays about the American-Jewish experience.
In it, he found the following, written by Bauland and Ingram: A character in a Hollywood film of the 1950s casually drops this line:"Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out." The screenplay was by
Clifford Odets, America's chief inheritor of the dramatic tradition of Anton Chekhov, and in that one line, he epitomised the lesson of his master.
Spivey describes his approach to the play as a "stylized mix of agitprop movement and multimedia woven between the written monologues about Tamir." For Spivey, the appeal of working on the play stemmed from "the angle from which the dialogue is coming—from the community." He notes that "in addition to creating fictional characters, it is our job [as theater artists] to reflect the just and unjust in the real world as they did back in the days of
Clifford Odets and LeRoi Jones.
Lahr, an author and drama critic, collects profiles and reviews he wrote for The New Yorker of playwrights, productions, and directors, including Arthur Miller, August Wilson, Tony Kushner, David Mamet, Sarah Ruhl,
Clifford Odets, David Rabe, Harold Pinter, Wallace Shawn, Neil LaBute, Sam Shepard, William Shakespeare, Nicholas Hytner, Ingmar Bergman, Susan Stroman, John Barton, and Arcadia, The Pajama Game, The Retreat from Moscow, Private Lives, Company, Sweeney Todd, Me, Myself & I, Oklahoma!, The Light in the Piazza, Orpheus Descending, The Rose Tattoo, and Carousel.
At age 17 he was cast in a local production of
Clifford Odets' "Awake and Sing'' as the son in a Jewish family.
Rainer was at one time married to the playwright
Clifford Odets.
The musical will follow two other boxing-related works to appear on Broadway recently: Mike Tyson's one-man show about his life in and out of the ring, and a revival of
Clifford Odets' "Golden Boy" about a young man torn between his natural talent as a violinist and the fast money of boxing.
In a recent, enthusiastic review of Lincoln Center's outstanding revival of
Clifford Odets's 1937 play "Golden Boy," New York magazine's current man on the aisle wrote: "There are, walking around today, whole generations of theatergoers with no firsthand experience of
Clifford Odets's plays--not in-performance, anyway.
The play was Waiting for Lefty, by
Clifford Odets, and the show was so successful it gave the group the confidence to go from strength to strength ...