In one of his notebooks,
Odets mused, "The American and dehumanizing myth of the steadily expanding economy...
Odets, far from being forgotten after his meteoric rise to fame in the late 1930s, in addition to co-authoring the outstanding film "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957), went on to write popular non-polemical plays, such as his 1950 Broadway hit "The Country Girl,' which was made into a successful 1954 film with Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby, and "The Flowering Peach" (1954), which the 1955 Pulitzer drama jury reportedly favored but the Pulitzer board awarded the prize to Tennessee Williams's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."
In his letters to Louise he addresses these issues and other family matters, but he also offers information on such works of his as 14 Ways to Describe Rain, Hollywood Songbook, Woodbury-Songbook, his music for
Odets's Night Music, and his score for the film Forgotten Village (directed by Herb Kline, 1941).
So this rare revival of
Odets' 1950 Broadway hit would be a collector's item for theatre buffs.
Part of the 1930s Group Theatre ensemble, Garfield played Ralph Berger in the original production of Clifford
Odets' Awake and Sing (1935) and was the actor initially intended for the role of Joe Boneparte in the theatre company's first mounting of
Odets' Golden Boy (1937).
On one occasion I asked them to read the following lines from
Odets' (1935/1979: 7-8) play
Odets shamelessly ups the ante: snitches, anti-Semites, Red-baiters, an industrialist trying to lure a worker into a career making poison gas.
Among the featured playrights are Adrienne Kennedy, Clifford
Odets, Suzan-Lori Parks, Robert Patrick, Sung J.
Their influences are a who's who of independent theatre notables, like left-leaning playwrights George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht, along with Clifford
Odets and the Group Theater of 1930s New York, and Dario Fo's Italian theatrical collectives.
Long under the spell of radical writers such as Dalton Trumbo and Clifford
Odets, Hollywood was "a town that welcomed Daniel Ortega of the Sandinista junta but never took up the cause of a single Soviet or Eastern European dissident."
The Forverts played a pivotal role in the Yiddishization of American English by perfecting a journalistic style approximating one-to-one conversational Yiddish which, during the Depression years, writers like Mike Gold, Meyer Levin, Leo Rosten, and Clifford
Odets translated into American English.