[In this assessment of Golden Boy, Young praises Odets' handling of dialogue, adding: "In this respect Mr. Odets is the most promising writer our theatre can show. "]

It seems to me the first thing about Mr. Odets' new play that we should mention is a certain quality in the dialogue. He has a sense of character drawing that exhibits the courage of outline. An unusual number of the characters in Golden Boy are set beside one another with the right bold theatre instinct, a perception of the fact, unknown to most playwrights nowadays, that character in fiction and character on the stage are two very different matters—see the fuzzy nonsense in most British plays that come to Broadway. He has an intuition of emotional impacts that make real theatre instead of mere description. The story in Golden Boy wanders for a few moments at the start but goes straight on after that. The number of motifs in personality, reactions, inheritance, hurts, secrecies, hopes, happiness, fate, bodily conditions, and so forth may seem crowded in at times, to lack a steady, or mature, distribution and proportion; but the direction is a good one nevertheless, it makes for abundance, it interweaves elements that promise a living fabric. His conception of the scenes, where to emphasize, where bring down the curtain, has grown neater and sharper. And the insistence, more or less adolescent, that once threw things in our faces is warmed now into both better persuasion and better taste.

The point I wanted to stress as where his theatre gift most appears is in the dialogue's avoidance of the explicit. The explicit, always to be found in poor writers trying for the serious, is the surest sign of lack of talent. To write in terms of what is not said, of combinations elusive and in detail, perhaps, insignificant, of a hidden stream of sequences, and a resulting air of spontaneity and true pressure—that is quite another matter. In this respect Mr. Odets is the most promising writer our theatre can show. The effect very often, and always the promise, of such a manner of dialogue is glowing, impressive and worthy of the response and applause that the audience gives it.

The performance of the play—under Mr. Harold Clurman's direction—is here and there tense at present but can soon be eased; it is on the whole varied, truly theatric and admirable. The Group Theatre seems to have contrived a genuine renewal. Mr. Carnovsky as the old Italian father, Mr. Adler as the golden boy, Mr. Kazan as the killer boss, etc., give capital performances, better than can be shown in a few words here. Miss Frances Farmer, following other starry leads eastward from Hollywood, played well. She needs only more fluency in order to vary the rhythm of her performance; and she might wisely ask of the author or the director some change from a perpetual coming in at the door, entrance after entrance. Much of the other playing was good.