The Sheila Variations

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets : With an Introduction by William Gibson

Clifford Odets (playwright in the 30s and 40s – inspiration to Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, a generation of playwrights – and he inspires still (although some of his plays have dated badly) kept a journal throughout his tumultuous life. His plays mean the world to me. I was in a production of Golden Boy in Chicago, and his language, of all the great playwrights, is one of the funnest to chew on. It’s meaty, poetic, streetsmart, idealistic, tough, hard-boiled, soft underbelly – it’s evocative so much of a time and place (you can usually FEEL the Great Depression in his work … that world is IN the language) – and it’s not easy for modern actors to get that language right. It’s not NOW. It’s not strictly THEN either. But if you have a line like (one of my favorites of his): “Don’t give me ice when your heart’s on fire!” – you cannot – you MUST not – say it with a wink at the audience, you must NOT add any sense of irony to it … you must find it within yourself to really feel and mean “Don’t give me ice when your heart’s on fire” – or you will just sound like a big fat phony up onstage. And worse than that, a condescending phony. Clifford Odets, as a playwright, really reveals falsity in actors … You can’t hide, or do any tricks when you’re in an Odets play. You have to be comfortable with that language, make it your own, and you have to fill up the inner life with whatever needs to be there – so that that language feels organic. Nobody SINKS an actor like Clifford Odets. We’ve got lines in his plays like:

We got the blues, Babe — the 1935 blues. I’m talkin’ this way ’cause I love you. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t care …

Or

You won’t forget me to your dyin’ day — I was the first guy. Part of your insides. You won’t forget. I wrote my name on you — indelible ink!

Or this, from the same scene = I love this line:

So I made a mistake. For Chris’ sake, don’t act like the Queen of Romania!

Or

Yes, yes, the whole thing funnels up in me like a fever. My head’ll bust a vein!

Or

A sleeping clam at the bottom of the ocean, but I’ll wake you up. I’m through with the little wars: no more hacking, making a pound in a good day. Like old man Pike says, every man for himself nowadays, and when you’re in a jungle you look out for the wild life. I put on my Chinese good luck ring and I’m out to get mine. You’re the first stop!

Or this famous exchange from Golden Boy:

JOE. What did he ever do for you?

LORNA. [with sudden verve] Would you like to know? He loved me in a world of enemies, of stags and bulls! … And I loved him for that. He picked me up in Friskin’s hotel on 39th Street. I was nine weeks behind in rent. I hadn’t hit the gutter yet, but I was near. He washed my face and combed my hair. He stiffened the space between my shoulder blades. Misery reached out to misery —

JOE. And now you’re dead.

LORNA. [lashing out] I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!

JOE. Yes, you do …

This is tough stuff. It requires 100% authenticity. It’s easy to make it a cliche – the hard-boiled mugs of the 1930s – but if you miss out on what is underneath – these people’s real fire and dreams – you got nothin’. Sylvester Stallone has credited Clifford Odets as a major influence on his own writing, and you can hear echoes of it in Rocky and even more so in Paradise Alley – a movie I adore (that will be next up in my Under-rated Movies series) – which takes place in the early years of the 20th century, and the SCRIPT. That’s one of the few movies where I thought: “I need to get my hands on that script. I want to see that language on the page.” It’s fantastic!

Clifford Odets was catapulted into fame in the early 30s with his play Waiting for Lefty (excerpt here. He became a resident playwright with the influential Group Theatre (although they didn’t believe in him at all at first – but the success of Waiting for Lefty changed things). It hadn’t even been, strictly, a Group Theatre production – it was put together for a benefit night to support a Communist magazine – it was one piece in a long night of agitprop. But it hit to such a degree that it was one of THOSE moments in American theatre – a watershed moment … God, for a time machine to have seen that play in its first incarnation in 1935! Wendy Smith in her comprehensive book about the Group Theatre Real Life Drama describes what happened on that night, and what it meant:

To Kazan, seated in the auditorium waiting for his cue, the response was “like a roar from sixteen-inchers broadside, audience to players, a way of shouting, ‘More! More! More! Go on! Go on! Go on!'” Swept up by the passion they had aroused, the actors were no longer acting. “They were being carried along as if by an exultancy of communication such as I have never witnessed in the theatre before,” wrote [Harold] Clurman. The twenty-eight-year-old playwright was awed by the emotional conflagration he’d ignited. “You saw theatre in its truest essence,” Odets remembered years later. “Suddenly the proscenium arch of the theatre vanished and the audience and actors were at one with each other.”

As the play mounted to its climax, the intensity of feeling on and offstage became almost unbearable. When Bobby Lewis dashed in with the news that Lefty has been murdered, no one needed to take an exercise to find the appropriate anger – the actors exploded with it, the audience seethed with it. They exulted as Joe Bromberg, playing the union rebel Agate Keller, tore himself loose from the hired gunmen and declared their independence: “HELLO AMERICA! HELLO. WE’RE STORMBIRDS OF THE WORKING-CLASS … And when we die they’ll know what we did to make a new world!”

“Well, what’s the answer?” Bromberg demanded. In the audience, as planned, Odets, Herbie Ratner, and Lewis Leverett began shouting “Strike!” “LOUDER!” Bromberg yelled – and, one by one, from all over the auditorium, individual voices called out, “Strike!” Suddenly the entire audience, some 1,400 people, rose and roared, “Strike! Strike!” The actors froze, stunned by the spontaneous demonstration. The militant cries gave way to cheers and applause so thunderous the cast was kept onstage for forty-five minutes to receive the crowd’s inflamed tribute. “When they couldn’t applaud anymore, they stomped their feet,” said Ruth Nelson. “All I could think was, ‘My God, they’re going to break the balcony down!’ It was terrible, it was so beautiful.” The actors were all weeping. When Clurman persuaded Odets to take a bow, the audience stormed the stage and embraced the man who had voiced their hopes and fears and deepest aspirations. “That was the dram all of us in the Group Theatre had,” said Kazan, “to be embraced that way by a theatreful of people.”

“The audience wouldn’t leave,” said Cheryl Crawford. “I was afraid they were going to tear the seats out and throw them on the stage.” When the astounded stage manager finally rang down the curtain, they remained out front, talking and arguing about the events in a play taht seemed as real to them as their own lives. Actors and playwright were overwhelmed and a little frightened by the near-religious communion they had just shared. Odets retreated to a backstage bathroom; his excitement was so intense he threw up, then burst into tears. The dressing room was hushed as the actors removed their makeup. They emerged onto 14th Street to find clusters of people still gathered outside, laughing, crying, hugging each other, clapping their hands. “There was almost a sense of pure madness about it,” Morris Carnovsky felt.

No one wanted to go home. Sleep was out of the question. Most of the Group went to an all-night restaurant – no one can remember now which one – and tried to eat. Odets sat alone: pale, withdrawn, not talking at all. Everyone was too dazed to have much to say. It was dawn before they could bring themselves to separate, to admit that the miracle was over.

There had never been a night like it in the American theatre. The Group became a vessel into which were poured the rage, frustration, desperation, and finally exultation, not just of an angry young man named Clifford Odets, but of every single person at the Civic Rep who longed for an end to personal and political depression, who needed someone to tell them they could stand up and change their lives. The Group had experienced the “unity of background, of feeling, of thought, of need” Clurman had said was the basis for a true theatre: during his inspiring talks at Brookfield, at the thrilling final run-through of Connelly, in some of the best performances of Success Story. Never before had they shared it with an entire theatre full of people, never before had it seemed as though the lines they spoke hadn’t been written but rather emerged from a collective heart and soul. Theatre and life merged, as Clurman had promised they could.

Waiting for Lefty changed people’s ideas of what theatre was. More than an evening’s entertainment, more even than a serious examination of the contemporary scene by a thoughtful writer, theatre at its best could be a living embodiment of communal values and aspirations. Theatre mattered, art had meaning, culture wasn’t the property of an affluent, educated few but an expression of the joys and sorrows of the human condition as they could be understood and shared by everyone.

Waiting for Lefty made Clifford Odets a star in New York, and in the circles of the American Left – and while the Group Theatre had been devoted to developing new work, and fostering playwrights who could speak to the NOW, they had missed out on the genius in their midst. They ended up putting on many of his plays – which are now considered classics of the American theatre: Awake and Sing (excerpt here), Paradise Lost (excerpt here), Golden Boy (excerpt here) – just to name a few. He was the voice of the Great Depression, of the angry radical, the Jewish New Yorker, the downtrodden, the hopeful. Odets was a Zeitgeist kind of guy. It’s one of the reasons why he found his later career so strenuous and difficult … when you tap into a Zeitgeist of a certain time and place (and not just tap into it – but give voice to it) it can be nigh on impossible to translate that into another time/place. That’s what happened to him. Also, how do you compete with such blazing early success? I love all of Odets’ plays – not just his famous 1930s plays – I love Big Knife (excerpt here), I love Country Girl (excerpt here), I love The Flowering Peach (excerpt here)… but his time, his PLACE, was the mid-1930s. And that’s IT. Without context, Odets’ work does not translate. HIs writing does … but these are, necessarily, “period” pieces, although at the time of their first productions they were the most relevant new thing anyone had ever seen. There’s a similarity here to William Inge, although his themes and style are quite different. He was the biggest playwright of the 1950s. He was a Neil Simon, a Tony Kushner – in terms of the HITS that he had. But outside of the stifled conventional atmosphere of the 50s – where young people bucked up against the social and sexual conventions of the older generation – his work doesn’t travel. You can’t REALLY update William Inge. You have to place those plays in the 50s. They don’t travel.

Without understanding that context of Odets, his plays may seem … trite, or small, or naive. His theme is how the individual man can maintain his dignity, his human worth, in the middle of a capitalist society. He has written lines like, “Is life written on dollar bills?” WORTH has nothing to do with money … but when you have no money, it sure as shit is difficult to remember that. His plays in the 30s insist upon human dignity, but also (like in Golden Boy) insist on the fact that there is compromise, and tragedy. This is where he can seem, to modern eyes, a bit naive – but it is essential to place him in his context.

But what remains (for me anyway) is not so much the thematic elements, the snapshot of urban life in the 30s – but the language. Odets’ language!! It’s raw, it’s poetic, and it’s not realistic. I like to read his plays out loud, just to myself – that language is fun fun fun to say.

Harold Clurman wrote about Odets:

Odets wrote some of the finest love scenes to be found in American drama. An all-enveloping warmth, love in its broadest sense, is a constant in all Odets’ writing, the very root of his talent. IT is there in tumultuous harangues, in his denunciations and his murmurs. It is by turns hot and tender. Sometimes it sounds in whimpers. It is present as much in the scenes between grandfather and grandson in Awake as in those of Joe and Lorna in Golden Boy. It is touchingly wry in Rocket. This explains why these scenes are chosen by so many actors for auditions and classwork.

The Group Theatre lasted for only a decade. By the end of it, much of the original mission had been smoothed over – and they were hiring “outside” people for roles, as opposed to relying on the ensemble, and there were many other issues. People wanted out. And the world was changing, too – the Group had some really rough times at the end, where they couldn’t seem to “hit it” as they had earlier in the decade. Had they just run their course?

Clifford Odets wrote a play called Night Music, and it is, I think, one of his best. It has Saroyan elements – a sort of magical middle-of-the-night quality – and there is much of it that I feel Lanford Wilson was inspired by, later in the 60s – even though his characters in Balm in Gilead are the dregs of society. But Odets – by having his play full of people – there has to be 40, 50 characters in that play – similar to Wilson – and these denizens of the night streets, the people who only come out at 2 a.m. … the floating snippets of conversation, fragments heard, all operating in order to highlight the lonely journey of the two leads towards each other – really reminds me of Wilson. Night Music is an ambitious play and I would love to see it done more. It’s funny, it’s touching, it has great characters – and it’s one of those plays that take place in only one night – a crazy night when nobody gets any sleep, and everyone appears to be homeless, looking for something in the crazy 3 a.m. hour. This would be the last play put on by the Group Theatre. It was 1940. Elia Kazan was the male lead. I believe Harold Clurman directed. It was a production and a half – a giant stage, tons of characters … and for many different reasons, the play was a huge flop. It was the end of the Group Theatre. They had really needed a hit, and had hoped Night Music would be it. I somehow think that Night Music COULD have been a hit. It is not a dreary play, there are not awkward plot elements like some of Odets’ earlier stuff – he keeps it light and funny and romantic. Seems like a sure thing to me. But for whatever reaon (and Clifford had many opinions about it) – the play failed to find an audience.

It was over. The grand experiment in American theatre was over. The ensemble members would scatter to the four winds. Some would find their way to movie stardom (like John Garfield, Elia Kazan) – others would eventually become the premiere acting teachers in this country (Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Bobby Lewis). Many of them were impacted by the Hollywood blacklist, due to their Communist associations in the past – and also just guilt by association. Odets went to Hollywood and started writing screenplays. His journey is told in the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink. Odets never found his stride in Hollywood – he had a similar sensibility to F. Scott Fitzgerald – he was an artist and he couldn’t seem to protect himself properly from the mercenary demands, and … he was always left with the feeling of: “Is this all there is?”

Not a happy man.

In 1940, during the rehearsal and failed production of Night Music, Clifford Odets kept a journal. That journal has been published and it is now certainly a classic of its kind, essential reading for anyone who is an artist, for struggling actors, playwrights – whatever – When I was in grad school, I didn’t know one person who hadn’t read it. It’s AMAZING and it makes you want to … oh … I don’t know … run out and be an artist! Have every part of your life reflect your commitment to your art! LIVE TO THE FULLEST. Etc. Odets was obviously not having the best year in 1940 – so he was not at the top of the world … Much of the diary describes late nights at jazz clubs, troubled rehearsals during the day, and evenings when he would lose himself in his beloved Beethoven (boy, is he eloquent on Beethoven) – to try to regroup. It’s a rather wandering type of journal – as any journal would be … and on every single page there is something to “take away”. Almost none of it has to do with to-do lists or what he did that day. He is trying to work out his own artistic problems in the pages of his journal – his issues with “form” and character and subtext … at times he’s like a dog with a bone – an entire week he devotes to talking about “form”, and what that means for him as a playwright, and how Beethoven teaches him about form.

It’s a wonderful book. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I pick it up all the time – it’s one of my constant books, something I dip into, just open it up and whatever page it falls on there will be some gem, something that helps me to go deeper, to contemplate, to struggle, to strive.

He is about to go into his long decline – which is sad, because he has such fire and energy here. In 1944, he made his directorial debut with None but the Lonely Heart – starring Cary Grant. This was the second part Grant was nominated for an Oscar for – mainly because of the big crying scene at the end. (The fact that Grant would not be nominated – then or now – for his performance in His Girl Friday – is just indicative of how silly those awards can be!!)

Odets and Grant were friends until the very end – and Odets had a particularly sad end. The guy had a long way to fall, and boy, did he fall. Grant would lend him money, or go and sit with him and talk and laugh and try to help his friend. None but the Lonely Heart is obviously Odets-ian – the themes, the compromises (it’s always about choosing money or love, choosing money or humanity) – but what’s really interesting about it is how great it LOOKS. The MOOD of the movie is really the reason to see it. It has an almost Fritz Lang-ish feel to it, eerie, melancholy, big empty urban streets, the alienation of urban life made manifest in the dark cobblestones – it’s a great looking movie.

But The Time is Ripe gives us just a glimpse – a glimpse of a working man of the theatre in 1940 – working on one particular play – and, as Stanley Kauffman has said in response to the book – Odets comes off as “bursting, struggling, impatient, agonizing, egocentric, limited … generous … eager to understand his society, even more eager to be the best dramatist that his times and his talents would allow.”

I consider The Time is Ripe to be required reading. Not only is it interesting about Odets himself – but it is interesting about America, and cultural issues, and Marxism, and Stalin, and the big thought of Russia – and all of those elements of the Left at that time – here they are, on paper. As always, Odets was a man of his time. He embodied it. Thank God he could write. He might have been just another propagandist, but you cannot argue with the power of those early plays. Yes, he has a point of view. What good artist doesn’t? But as I mentioned before: what really remains, what he has left us, is those WORDS.

Here’s an excerpt.

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