"The Country Girl" is lightweight Odets. That the least meaty of his plays should prove to be almost the most popular is significant of the press, not of the author.

No more gifted playwright has appeared in the past fifteen years. I doubt whether any American playwright at all has a greater talent for living dramatic speech, for characterization, for intensity of feeling. Above all, Odets is a true theatre poet: he is never literal, and his power with words does not represent verbal proficiency but a blood tie with the sources from which sound literature and dramatic action spring.

Apart from a certain romantic afflatus, which is at times an easily discernible defect but more often a virtue, the strength of Odets' work lies in his main theme and the particular quality of its statement. The question Odets constantly asks is: What helps a man live? Since we are citizens of the twentieth century, we may translate this as: What today injures man's spirit? What enhances or diminishes the creatively human in him? (pp. 29-30)

Odets' art has an immediacy and an intimacy equaled by no other dramatist of our generation. His plays strike home; they touch us where we live. Though they often shout, they are powerful because, in fact, they speak quietly to our hearts. They are moving because beneath their occasional bluster they sigh and weep with our own unadvertised and non-literary anguish. Their tone sometimes has a slight aura of portentousness, but at bottom they are unabashedly homey.

When at first he emphasized economic pressure as the deterrent to man's development, Odets was considered new, bold and "revolutionary," and his name became consonant with a big social noise. But this was partly due to the mood of the thirties and our foolish appetite for novelty. Later, when he began to explore the depressive effect of the wounded ego on man's soul, he no longer seemed so "new," though in fact he had become subtler and more valuable. The truth is that even "the economic interpretation" of man's unhappiness in Odets' first plays was only an indirect statement of one of the ways Americans feel the injury to their egos.

This confusion in understanding Odets results in part from his immaturity of judgment in regard to his own feeling. Corresponding to the conflict between his inadequate plot structures and his swarming emotion, there has always been a discrepancy between what he is and what he thinks he is, a breach between his consciousness and his actual experience. The most visible dramatic symptom of this was the clash between the story line in some of his later plays and what he expected us to gather from them. This produced an increasing emotional and artistic turmoil which reached its most distressing state in "The Big Knife."

To evade this dilemma, Odets has written "The Country Girl," in which he pretends to do nothing but tell a "human-interest" story as effective stage ware. But he is so subjective a writer that he must disclose something of his true feeling. In "The Country Girl" he tells us that the faltering and enfeebled artist (or man) may be restored by the staunch love of a woman if it is combined with the steady assistance of a friend.

To my mind the play is thin in characterization, meager in authentic feeling, shallow in invention. It is by no means dull, because Odets can never be uninteresting. Even his least vital effort smolders unmistakably with the black burn of his not-so-secret hurt—and there are always those flashes of humor and warm understanding that make us realize that we are in the presence of a person, not just a showman. This play, then, is a victory by default. By giving up some of his complexity, Odets has, for the moment, ceased to trouble us, even as he has failed to inspire. The negative discipline Odets has here imposed on himself may prove useful to his future even as it has proved profitable to his present. (p. 30)