The most acclaimed writer of the thirties was Clifford Odets. He rose out of the Depression to give voice to a world in crisis. He put the Bronx Jewish middle class on stage and gave them courage, dignity, and stature. (p. 109)

Paradoxically, Odets was the playwright least able to maintain persuasive drama in the sixties. His exodus to Hollywood, together with many members of the Group Theatre, removed him from his natural nourishment. When he returned to Broadway ten years later with The Big Knife, he no longer was a man of social anger. Success had deprived him of identification with the downtrodden. Of the next plays, The Country Girl (1950) was an outright attempt at a superficial success, and The Flowering Peach (1954), a drama that never focused precisely on what it had to say.

The human dislocation caused by the Depression supplied Odets with his strength as an artist. He rallied a nation to action and hope…. The result is theatre in its oldest form, an Epic theatre technique involving the audience and propelling them into open participation. Waiting for Lefty has a hard-hitting, bare, cumulative power, very much like a tribal war dance.

The members of a thug-dominated, taxi-drivers' union belong, for the most part, to the middle class that has fallen socially—the American dream in reverse. No longer do they have hopes of rising beyond their station. To Odets, as to Bernard Shaw, the greatest crime is poverty. Not psychopathic disturbances, but failure to support the family, turns men to desperate actions or makes them submit to failure. In Awake and Sing and Paradise Lost, a disintegrating family is held together momentarily by a courageous mother. (p. 110)

The language Odets used was fresh and invigorating—twisted, torn images of rare strength, a poetry of the people often excessive and at times brilliant. (pp. 110-11)

Though Waiting for Lefty is expressionist in form, its content is realistic, as is all of Odets' work. The small people crushed by economic forces and pictured magnificently as they give way or rise in dignity. Too often, the final affirmation is tagged on mechanically. In Waiting for Lefty, the rank-and-file voice of Agate shouts out like a Communist leader on the barricades. (p. 111)

[The] final exhilarating but inconsistent affirmations [as in Awake and Sing] were requirements of the play of the Depression, for actuality was full of heartbreak and terror. Pain and suffering make up the substance of the Depression play. Lives are destroyed, but there is hope for a better world, if people fight for it, a world in which people will be able to "awake and sing." In an interview published in Theatre Arts Magazine, Odets said of Leo's speech that he did believe in the possibilities expressed in this theme, and that it was a logical outgrowth of the text. "I believe that older and more crushed human beings can pass on some lifting values to the younger generation."

In Odets' plays, the Depression, as a special moment in American life, is evident in every scene. Today, the working class has risen to middle-class comfort, and Odets' former Bronx characters now live more comfortably in the suburbs. Audiences no longer have the same identification, save for the underprivileged and the oppressed minorities. Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun is an Odets drama with Negro replacements. In his own day, Odets was a man with a mission, and his plays burned with furious intensity. He gave vitality to the theatre of an era and established a memorable place in our history, but today his early plays are rarely revived. A production of Waiting for Lefty at Williams College was greeted with loud applause by the sons of the wealthy, all of whom shouted at the end, with playful enthusiasm, "Strike!" The work has become a museum piece, a sociological document.

When Odets returned to Broadway with The Big Knife, his first play after many years of financial success in Hollywood, he retreated to the personal drama. Charley Castle seeks to escape from Hollywood's erosion of his artistic integrity, but he really wants the physical comfort that Hollywood offers. The drama never reached beyond Odets' own dilemma. Everyone attacks Hollywood, particularly those who have been its best-paid hirelings. No one yet has made the attack significant. Satire would be a more effective weapon.

Odets seemed troubled by success and his desertion of a cause. Golden Boy is his own story, raising the question of whether art and commerce mix. Odets wanted big money, but his voluntary submission to its code became the big knife. No one else was particularly concerned. (pp. 111-12)

Odets' technique kept him afloat in the less demanding medium of the motion picture, but he longed to return to the theatre with another try at socially significant drama. Before his death in 1963, however, he was back in Hollywood preparing a television series for Richard Boone's acting company, which encouraged serious work. Only two scripts were completed.

Odets betrayed his own talent. He was a sensitive man who believed in a better world to come, but he was unable to sustain that belief under difficult and changing social conditions. He was a lonely writer, but too weak to become a great one. In the thirties, however, he rose splendidly as the playwright most able to dramatize an injured nation in need of hope and unity. (p. 113)