Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing

Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! Synopsis of the Play Awake and Sing! focuses on the life of the impoverished Berger family, who all live under one roof, and their conflicts as the parents scheme to manipulate their children's relationships to their own ends, while their children strive for their own dreams. Three generations of the Berger family live under one roof. The mother, Bessie, is the central pillar that has held the family together during difficult times. She fears that she, like an old woman on nearby Dawson Street, will be driven out from her home, her belongings put out on the street around her. The household consists of extended family such as Bessie's father, Jacob, her husband Myron, and their son Ralph and spinster daughter Hennie. The audience is introduced to a unique family. The matriarch of the family, Bessie, had high hopes and dreams for her family; however, despite her hopefulness, her largest fear is that her family will lose their home and all their possessions. This fear arises from a woman down the street who has had this exact thing happen to her. Bessie, whose father, Jacob, a left-leaning idealist, lives in her house, has a subdued husband, Myron, and two children, Ralph and Hennie. In order to ease the financial burden on the family and enhance her meager budget, the Bergers have taken in an immigrant boarder, named Sam. Appearances mean everything to Bessie, who wants little more from life than respectability. Her decent existence is severely threatened. She has already coped with one assault on her family’s respectability, her daughter Hennie’s pregnancy out of wedlock, but she forces Hennie into a loveless marriage to the boarder to whom she rents a room. Besides the desire for financial stability, there are other problems that the Bergers face, such as Hennie's unwanted illegitimate pregnancy. To avoid this burden on the family, Bessie insists on the marriage between Hennie and the new immigrant boarder in order to save her family's reputation and her daughter's life. Hennie has no love for Sam. The family has very different views on the arranged marriage between Hennie and Sam. For example, Ralph, the more philosophical character of the play, is not in agreement with his mother's decision. The son, Ralph, is appalled by the shotgun union his mother has engineered. An unemployed idealist, Ralph sides philosophically with his grandfather. Jacob rails against families, saying, “This is a house? Marx said it—abolish such families.” Ralph complains that life should not be printed on dollar bills. Ralph very much resembles his grandfather who is an idealist. The Berger house is therefore divided into idealists and realists, much like society as a whole. Jacob, the idealist, disenchanted with the society in which he lives, goes to the roof of the building in which the Bergers reside and throws himself into the street below and commits suicide. Before he does this, however, he makes Ralph the beneficiary on his five-thousand-dollar life insurance policy, expecting this will give Ralph new hope. In Awake and Sing, Odets claimed that he was writing not about individuals so much as about a whole social class being sundered by economic problems beyond their control. One solution he offers is particularly alarming and ironic. In creating this ending, Odets shows the confusion of value systems under which some of his characters were living. Jacob, who would abolish families, gives Ralph the wherewithal to marry and create a family.