Some Problems of the Modern Dramatist (1935)

SOURCE: The New York Times, 15 December 1935, Section II, p. 1

[In the following article, Odets defends his technique of constructing plays without plots.]

No one will deny that all over the world today life is changing for better or worse for millions of human beings. Such changes have taken place before in history; and in each place where it has happened life has been a hell for the artist trying to express that time.

For as the established social order breaks down, the same process is working out in the artist's forms. Blithely, and with great talent, Mozart is able to spill twoscore or so symphonies on paper. Beethoven, a few years later, in a period of social flux, is able to write only nine, which means that the symphonic form was sufficiently stabilized for Mozart to keep minting out coins from the same mold, while his distinguished pupil had to make a new mold for each of his gold pieces.

Beethoven was caught in a period when society was slowly and surely swinging upward to what is now known as an individualistic society. Today that society is changing to something else. The serious artist—large or small talent—is finding again that the old forms fail him. He must make his own molds. Which brings us to the question of the "well-made three-act play."

Even a cursory examination of various American dramatists' work shows serious craft problems. It is easy to see that for them the slick synthetic plot play is an out-moded form. (The fourth act has long since been delivered to the ash heap.) And even where the three-act form is retained "third act trouble" is general instead of exceptional. Which means, in the final analysis, form not fitted to content. In what size and color pill to wrap the bitter tonic is one of the burning issues of the day.

By the time I came to write my first play, Awake and Sing! I understood clearly that my interest was not in the presentation of an individual's problems, but in those of a whole class. In other words, the task was to find a theatrical form with which to express the mass as hero.

In "Waiting for Lefty" this task was simplified for the reason that the dramatic conflicts and life lines of its people were all simple and direct. In each case the characters knew what enemy they were facing, what they wanted, some way to get it or the promise of it! A football game with two teams in the field. All of which makes plot elements!

In Paradise Lost the task was not so simple, the solution more complex. Here the hero is not the worker with conflicts cleared to the fighting point, the enemy visible, palpable. The hero in Paradise Lost is the entire American middle class of liberal tendency. The enemy is un-seen, nameless, but constant and deadly. A football game with one team on the field.

Here the characters are bewildered. The best laid plans go wrong. The sweetest human impulses are frustrated. No one lives a normal happy life here, and every decent tendency finds its complement in sterility and futility. Finally, these people find themselves "shadow boxing," as the director puts it, to the actors.

To write a slick three-act plot play about this slice of American society would be a lie from the start. For the truth is that at present their lives have no beginning, no middle, no end, no solution—all necessary for plot and story. They exist in time and space, with aspiration, to be sure, but no forward movement.

The pathetic Gus of Paradise Lost says it well when he says, "The way I see it, there's two kinds of men—the real one and the dream. We're just the dream." He is correct. He and his friends live a life of little volition, a sort of underwater life where the light is dim and physical contacts are cushioned and a little fantastic.

Meyerhold once said of Chekhov's characters, "They are not realistic portrayals, but like the reflections of people that one sees in water—wavering, fanciful." And the final truth is that Chekhov's people are not imaginative characters, but spring from the social impasse around him. His art caught and fixed them forever between several curtains—them and a whole era. And he knew that to imprison them in plots would be to do violence to the deepest truths of their lives and social backgrounds.

O'Casey in the bulk of his plays knows the same thing about his people. However, he does not share the social clarity of Chekhov, but seems to suppose—if we may judge from the lack of conclusions and explanations in his works—that brutality and degradation is rained upon people from the sky.

Our confused middle class today—which dares little—is dangerously similar to Chekhov's people. Which is why the people in Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost (particularly the latter) have what is called a "Chekhovian quality." Which is why it is sinful to violate their lives and aspirations with plot lines.

Plots are primer stuff, easily learned. Since the whole truth must be told, the most difficult problem is to avoid gratifying situations and stories. These people of our bourgeois American life must be treated with more dignity and heart than the banality of a clicking plot! They are too large in their reality and implication to be narrowed down to "the desire," the near satisfaction, the obstacle, the desire fulfilled!

Excuse us if we insist upon life brought to the stage instead of the stage brought to life! Excuse us if we do not accept the dictum that any deviation from Ibsen and the Pinero form is a deadly sin. Excuse us for not showing the gun in the first act, because it will later be used in the second. Excuse us for our neglect of a thousand tawdry theatre tricks which make primer plays and quick profits.

But please allow us to continue to respect the men and women all around us and make the theatre serve an earnest examination of their lives and backgrounds. In interesting new theatrical forms. With poetic conceptions. With character understanding. With fresh dialogue. With love.

How a Playwright Triumphs (1961)

SOURCE: Harper's, Vol. 233, No. 1396, September 1966, pp. 64-70, 73-4.

[In the excerpt below, Odets recalls the excitement and difficulties of his involvement with the Group Theatre and recounts the first performance of "Waiting for Lefty." This article was derived from an interview Odets gave in 1961, two years before his death.]

I had always wanted as a kid to be both an actor and a writer. For a while I thought I would be a novelist, but when I became a professional actor, my mind naturally began to take the form of the play as a means of saying something. I wasn't sure I had anything to say, because some of the other things I wrote were quite dismal. But being an actor, I began to think in terms of three acts, divisions of acts, and scenes within the acts, and whatever technique I have has been unconsciously absorbed—almost through my skin—with all the kinds of acting I have done.

Before Awake and Sing! I wrote a whole very bad novel and a few short stories, all of which I later tore up. The question is really not one of knowing how to write so much as knowing how to connect with yourself so that the writing is, so to speak, born affiliated with yourself. Anybody can teach the craft of play writing, just as I can teach myself how to make a blueprint and construct a house, on paper. But what cannot be taught, and what I was fortunate in discovering, was simply being myself, with my own problems and my own relationships to life.

Without the Group Theatre I doubt that I would have become a playwright. I might have become some other kind of writer, but the Group Theatre and the so-called "method" forced you to face yourself and really function out of the kind of person you are, not as you thought the person had to function, or as another kind of person, but simply using your own materials. The whole "method" acting technique is based on that. Well, after attempting to write for eight or ten years, I finally started a short story that made me really understand what writing was about in the sense of personal affiliation to the material.

I was holed up in a cheap hotel, in a kind of fit of depression, and I wrote about a young kid violinist who didn't have his violin because the hotel owner had appropriated it for unpaid bills. He looked back and remembered his mother and his hard-working sister, and although I was not that kid and didn't have that kind of mother or sister, I did fill the skin and the outline with my own personal feeling, and for the first time I realized what creative writing was.

A playwright who writes about things that he is not connected with, or to, is not a creative writer. He may be a very skilled writer, and it may be on a very high level of craft, but he's not going to be what I call an artist, a poet. We nowadays use the term creative arts, or a creative person, very loosely. A movie writer thinks of himself as a creative person who writes films or TV shows. Well, in the sense that I'm using the word, he's just a craftsman, like a carpenter. He has so many hammers, so many nails, so much dimension to fill, and he can do it with enormous skill. But the creative writer always starts with a state of being. He doesn't start with something outside of himself. He starts with something inside himself, with a sense of unease, depression, or elation, and only gradually finds some kind of form for what I'm calling that "state of being." He doesn't just pick a form and a subject and a theme and say this will be a hell of a show.

The form, then, is always dictated by the material; there can be nothing ready-made about it. It will use certain dramatic laws because, after all, you have to relate this material to an audience, and a form is the quickest way to get your content to an audience. That's all form is. Form is viability.

I was twenty-six years old when I started Awake and Sing!, my first play. I wrote the first two acts, and six months later, in the spring of 1933, I went home to my folks' house in Philadelphia and finished the last act there. That summer the Group Theatre went to a place called Green Mansions Camp [in the Adirondacks], where we sang for our supper by being the social staff. After he read Awake and Sing! Harold Clurman announced one night at a meeting of the entire company that the Group Theatre idea—that we would develop from our ranks not only our own actors, but our own directors and perhaps our own playwrights—was really working out in practice. "Lo and behold!" he said, "sitting right here in this room is the most talented new young playwright in the United States." And everybody, including me, turned around to see who was in the room and then with a horrible rush of a blush I realized he was talking about me.

But the Group Theatre didn't want to do the play. Although Harold Clurman, who was kind of the ideological head, liked it, he didn't have the strength to push it through to production against the wishes of the other two directors, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford. Lee Strasberg particularly didn't like the play. He kept saying, "It's a mere genre study." Strasberg and I were always on the outs. …

This was now August or September of 1934, and the Group Theatre was determined in the purity of its heart, that it would have to go away and do a new play when it might very well have continued the run of the very successful, and by this time Pulitzer Prize, Men in White. But purity prevailed and we went up to Ellenville, New York, to a big, rambling, broken-down hotel—don't forget, with its office and managerial staff the Group Theatre consisted of maybe thirty-six men and women and their children—and we had to find quite a large place to live in. We arrived practically when autumn was setting in at this old Saratoga-type wooden hotel, with all the bedding piled up, and we lived in an itchy and uncomfortable way there for about five or six weeks while we put into rehearsal a play by Melvin Levy, called Gold Eagle Guy. I had, perhaps un-fairly, only scorn and contempt for the play because I thought Awake and Sing! was far superior as a piece of writing. Indeed, we all felt that Gold Eagle Guy was a stillborn script, and Luther Adler summed it up for us one morning at rehearsal when he said, kind of sotto voce, "Boys, I think we're working on a stiff." That morning we were almost improvising certain scenes, which we would later scale down to the playwright's words. Levy would get alarmed because the actors were not quite saying his words, and not using his punctuation. To this day there are playwrights who don't know their punctuation isn't very important in the recreation of the character they've written, or that, as we used to say in the Group Theatre, their script is only a series of stenographic notes.

In any case, I had been given my own room at this old hotel, which gave me a certain lift. It's surprising how very important a small satisfaction can be in the life of one who is moving away from what I can only call illness to some kind of health or strength. (You must remember the background to all of this was that before I was twenty-five I had tried to commit suicide three times; once I stopped it myself and twice my life was saved by perfect strangers.) Before this I had always been quartered with one or two and sometimes three other actors, but when they gave me my own room, with clean, white-washed walls, I began to feel they had some sense that I had some kind of distinction, and I was very happy.

I had by now started Paradise Lost, about a man, Leo, who was trying to be a good man in the world and meets raw, evil, and confused conditions where his goodness means nothing. Almost all of that play came out of my experiences as a boy in the Bronx. I saw people evicted, I saw block parties, I knew a girl who stayed at the piano all day, a boy who drowned, boys who went bad and got in trouble with the police. As a matter of fact, two of the boys I graduated with ended up in the electric chair and another boy became a labor racketeer. Not too much of that play was invented; it was felt, remembered, celebrated.

One night I had the idea for the scene in the play which I call the Fire Bug Scene. It just impelled itself to be written, and since I had no paper I wrote the whole scene as fast as I could on the white wall. The words just gushed out; my hand couldn't stop writing. Then later, I copied it down on the typewriter, but to this day the scene may still be on the wall of that old hotel. …

Well, now we move up to Boston in the late fall of 1934 to open Gold Eagle Guy, and that's when I wrote "Waiting for Lefty." I now had behind me the practically completed Awake and Sing! and about half of Paradise Lost, but somehow "Waiting for Lefty" just kind of slipped itself in there. Its form and its feeling are different from the other two plays, and I actually wrote it in three nights in the hotel room in Boston after returning home from the theater about midnight. It just seemed to gush out, and it took its form necessarily from what we then called the agit-prop form, which, of course, stands for agitational propaganda.

I really saw the play as a kind of collective venture—something we would do for a Sunday night benefit in New York for the New Theatre Magazine, a Left magazine that was always in need of money. My demands were so modest that I tried to get two other actors in the Group Theatre who I thought had writing talent to assist me. One of them, Art Smith, came up with me one night to my hotel room and we talked around and around this thing, but he seemed rather listless about working with me, so I went ahead by myself.

As a matter of fact, the form of "Waiting for Lefty" is very rooted in American life, because what I semi-consciously had in mind was actually the form of the minstrel show. I had put on two or three minstrel shows in camp and had seen three or four other ones. It's a very American, indigenous form—you know, an interlocutor, end men, people doing their specialities, everyone sitting on the stage, and some of the actors sitting in the audience. There were a number of plays then, usually cheap and shoddy plays, that had actors in the audience. I had played in one called, I think, The Spider, in Camden, New Jersey, when I was in stock. I guess all these things conglomerated in my mind, but what's important for "Waiting for Lefty" is how it matched my conversion from a fellow who stood on the side and watched and then finally, with a rush, agreed—in this drastic social crisis in the early 'thirties—that the only way out seemed to be a kind of socialism, or the Communist party, or something. And the play represents that kind of ardor and that kind of conviction.

About ten days after the tryout in Boston we opened Gold Eagle Guy at the Morosco Theater in New York, and the play got very bad notices. In all New York theaters you automatically lose the theater when the play receipts fall below a certain figure, so we moved over to the Belasco. It happened that three or four or even five of my plays were done at that theater, which people thought was very glamorous, but I always thought it a rather crummy old joint, shabby, with uncomfortable seats. Anyway, to keep the play going the actors and the playwright took cuts in salary, but in a few weeks it closed and we were forced out into the cold winter. We had no new play to put into rehearsal and there was a sadness around the place.

In the meantime I'd gotten some of the actors together and had started to rehearse "Waiting for Lefty." I gave Sandy Meisner, an actor friend of mine, some of the scenes to direct, and I directed the bulk of the play. Strasberg, who was quite resentful of it, told Harold Clurman, "Let 'em fall and break their necks." One of the main things about Strasberg was that he always hated to go out on a limb. He must save his face at all times. Almost Oriental. I suspect that the thing about Strasberg was that whenever the Group Theatre name was used or represented, it was as though his honor was at stake. He didn't like me, he didn't like what I had written, and he felt it would in some way be a reflection on him, on the entire Group Theatre. This man who could be so generous, sometimes could be so niggardly and begrudging. It was with great trepidation that I had proposed putting on this play at all, and when I asked him a few questions about handling a group, an ensemble, he'd answer me very curtly, and I thought to myself, "Oh, the hell with him. I'll just go ahead and do this myself."

And then; the night of the benefit, I had an enormous fight down at the old Civic Repertory Theatre on 14th Street to get my play put on last. They used to put on eight or nine vaudeville acts there for the Sunday night benefits and they wanted some dance group to close the show, but finally, because I threatened to pull it, they agreed to put "Waiting for Lefty" on last.

It was very lucky they did because there would have been no show after that. The audience stopped the show after each scene; they got up, they began to cheer and weep. There have been many great opening nights in the American theater but not where the opening and the performing of the play were a cultural fact. You saw a cultural unit functioning. From stage to theater and back and forth the identity was so complete, there was such an at-oneness with audience and actors, that the actors didn't know whether they were acting and the audience didn't know whether they were sitting and watching it, or had changed position. I was sitting in the audience with my friend, Elia Kazan, sitting next to me (I wouldn't have dared take on one of the good parts myself) and after the Luther Adler scene, the young doctor scene, the audience got up and shouted, "Bravo! Bravo!" I was thinking, "Shh, let the play continue," but I found myself up on my feet shouting, "Bravo, Luther! Bravo, Luther!" In fact, I was part of the audience. I forgot I wrote the play, I forgot I was in the play, and many of the actors forgot. The proscenium arch disappeared. That's the key phrase. Before and since, in the American theater people have tried to do that by theater-in-the-round, theater this way, that way, but here, psychologically and emotionally, the proscenium arch dissolved away. When that happens, not by technical innovation, but emotionally and humanly, then you will have great theater—theater at its most primitive and grandest.

Of course, the nature of the times had a good deal to do with this kind of reaction. I don't think a rousing play today could have this kind of effect because mere are no positive, ascending values to which a play can attach itself.