It is a truism that, as the most public of the arts and the one therefore most immediately responsive to the pressures of its times, the drama may be considered a reliable indicator of current popular thought and sentiment. For the social and cultural historian, the ideas, subjects and themes presented onstage in any era provide useful clues to the states of mind prevailing in that era. This topicality of the theater, which is at once one of its most appealing qualities and a major source of its weakness, holds true whether we are dealing with Aristophanes or Albee. In the hands of a second-rate playwright, where topicality is all, the play sinks rapidly into its earned oblivion, to be exhumed only by scholars prowling dusty stacks; in the hands of more gifted writers, the topical issue is merely the point of departure for an examination of more lasting and general concerns. No one today remembers a 1934 play by Philip Barber entitled The Klein-Orbach Strike; but somehow The Cherry Orchard manages to remain alive.

Prior to World War I, however, the American theater seemed to be an exception to the general rule; it was only about 1916 that the late-flowering drama began to have any relevance to the American scene, coming to a full and explicit relationship in the 1930s. During that rapidly receding period of social dislocation and economic depression, the theater played an unusually active part in the ferment of national self-examination and criticism. This was the period of the so-called “proletarian literature,” a significant portion of which emerged in writing for the stage. The products of the WPA Federal Theatre constituted, for the most part, the high-water mark of that achievement; but, in addition, amateur groups, labor groups and left-wing “agit-prop” groups took to the empty lofts and stores and labor halls in order to present their ideas through the theatrical medium. This was the period of the Workers' Laboratory Theatre, the League of Workers' Theatres, Theatre Union, the New Theatre League, the Theatre of Action and the journal, New Theatre, which was the unofficial organ of these shifting and short-lived organizations. The common denominator for most of these groups—namely, their concept of theater—was defined by Joseph Freeman as “a school, a forum, a communal institution, a weapon in the hands of the masses for fashioning a sound society.”¹

Perhaps the best-remembered organization is the Group Theatre, an offshoot of the Theatre Guild, created by disgruntled younger artists who found the parent organization lacking in vision, forcefulness and relevance for the times. Certainly the single most important factor influencing the success of the Group Theatre was the discovery, within its own ranks, of a young actor-playwright named Clifford Odets. For a brief four-year period during its total existence of ten years, the Group flourished on Broadway (and even sent out a road company), and Odets became the candidate of the 1930s for the title of white hope of the American theater. After being variously hailed as the American Chekhov and the American O'Casey, Odets (like other members of the Group Theatre) went to Hollywood, and the Group eventually disbanded. But the impact of their achievement was powerful and memorable; and it was Odets' first full-length play, Awake and Sing!, presented at the Belasco Theatre on February 19, 1935, that established the Group as an important new element in the development of the American theater.²

Few plays and playwrights could avoid reflecting, in some measure, the malaise of the thirties, even when, superficially, the plays seemed to be setting out directly only to entertain, to provide for the spectators an evening's welcome escape from the disheartening Depression just outside the doors of the theater. In one sense, the choice of the play to receive the Pulitzer Prize for 1936 seems eminently appropriate today. Although the members of the Critics' Circle disagreed (they chose Maxwell Anderson's High Tor), the determinedly middlebrow Pulitzer Prize Committee gave the laurel to You Can't Take It with You, the comedy by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart that has since become the archetypal American farce. Certainly, You Can't Take It with You was not the best play of 1936 by any conceivable criterion of artistic merit; but it has survived the immediate moment both by the sheer inventiveness of its lunatic action and by the fact that, like Awake and Sing!, it represents a recurring, if simplified, strand in American thought. You Can't Take It with You is, in fact, Awake and Sing! turned inside out or upside down or seen through a mirror—but taken together they offer a revealing glimpse into the ways of the theater in the Depression era.

Awake and Sing!, dealing with the fortunes and misfortunes of the Berger (burgher?) family of the Bronx, was regarded by most critics in terms similar to those used by Burns Mantle when he included it in his list of the ten best plays of 1934-35. He called it “an embittered protest against the injustices put upon the poor by the workings of the capitalist system.”³ But this evaluation, it seems clear today, is grossly over-simplified.

Odets' first words about his characters are that they “share a fundamental activity: a struggle for life amidst petty conditions.” The family consists of Myron and Bessie Berger, their children Hennie and Ralph, and Grandpa Jacob. Myron has long since been defeated by life, but the domineering Bessie persists in trying to arrange her children's lives for them. Hennie, left pregnant and abandoned by a fickle suitor, consents reluctantly to Bessie's scheme to marry her off to a man she does not love, for the sake of respectability. Ralph, a stock clerk in his Uncle Morty's factory, is a naive and frustrated boy whose first love affair is broken up by Bessie, also in the interests of what she considers proper. The spokesman for rebellion against this spiritually as well as economically impoverished life is the grandfather, a retired barber (but, it is emphasized, an “artist”). Jacob is an old-fashioned idealistic revolutionary merely tolerated by his daughter; when he observes the bickering among the Bergers, he comments: “Marx said it—abolish such families.” But it is his plunge off the tenement roof in an apparent accident that enables Ralph to begin a new life. He rejects the insurance money Jacob has left him, but the old man's sacrifice opens his eyes, and the revolutionary spirit presumably passes on to Ralph in a new and more vigorous form. Ralph cries: “The night he died, I saw it like a thunderbolt! I saw he was dead and I was born!” At the same time, Hennie flees the Berger household with her old flame, the mordant racketeer Moe Axelrod, to “the place where it's moonlight and roses.” Moe, who has lost one leg in the war, values nothing but the immediate moment. The complete hardboiled cynic, he finally persuades Hennie to break her family ties: “Christ, baby,” he says, “there's one life to live! Live it!”

The two choices of the Berger children—one to flee, the other to stay and fight for a better life—however disparate they seem, have as their common source their discontent with life as they live it. Seen in this sense, Awake and Sing! is less a play dealing with the class struggle than one embodying the vague dissatisfactions of the lower middle class at the thwarting of normal human desires. “I never had a pair of black and white shoes!” cries Ralph, but it is not the shoes alone that he is crying for. That the play is not really a “revolutionary” play at all was recognized by the Left press; according to Harold Clurman, who directed the production, the New Masses “spoke gingerly” of it and the Daily Worker called it “an unimportant play whichever way you look at it.”⁴ Odets' original title, I Got the Blues, would seem also to indicate that he was less concerned with the uprising of “ye that dwell in the dust” than with the expression of a mood of widespread disquiet. But the final title, together with Ralph's outcry, as the play ends, that he is “twenty-two and kickin'” and ready to fight for a new life, seemed sufficiently ominous and specific to convince others besides Burns Mantle that Odets was calling for an immediate revolution.

With the popular success of Awake and Sing!, the Group Theatre, after years of promise, discouragement and continual near-failure, had finally arrived. Clurman's comment at the time was: “Now the Group has put on long pants.”⁵ During that winter of the Group's great success, Moss Hart, one of Broadway's most popular as well as professional playwrights, conceived of the idea for his next collaboration with George S. Kaufman. It was to be a play about another New York family—but quite unlike the Bergers of the Bronx. This comedy was to deal with an “utterly mad but lovable” family, each member of which did exactly as he pleased “and the hell with what other folks thought.” Kaufman and Hart had gotten as far as suggesting the title of Grandpa's Other Snake—fortunately vetoed by Mrs. Kaufman—before they dropped the project in favor of another idea. This new plan involved dramatizing an unpublished novel by Dalton Trumbo entitled Washington Jitters, a political satire which they intended to do in the broad strokes of Kaufman's 1932 Pulitzer Prize winner, Of Thee I Sing. In the summer of 1936, Kaufman left New York to join Hart in Hollywood and work on this project; when he arrived, however, Hart persuaded him to revert to the original idea of the mad family, and they wrote You Can't Take It with You in thirty days.⁶ But between the conception and the execution fell the political satire; and some buried element of that satire, with its reflections on contemporary American life, is present amidst the lunacies of the Vanderhof family.

It was the lunacies, of course, that made the play the immediate success it became. The Booth Theatre was sold out on the second night, and the play settled in for a long and prosperous run. Brooks Atkinson, with an unmistakable sigh of relief, applauded the fact that the play was not (for a change, evidently) “a moral harangue,” and praised the authors for being merely “fantastic humorists with a knack for extravagances of word and episode and an eye for hilarious incongruities.”⁷ George Jean Nathan, although learnedly pointing out that the “loony household idea” was far from being original, called it “superior fooling,” “thoroughly amusing” and “something winningly tender.”⁸ Another critic wrote that “it offers no serious contribution to social or political philosophy, and yet it is by all odds the most delightful American play to be seen so far this year.”⁹ The reviewer for Theatre Arts Monthly called it “all absurdity” and said of the characters: “There is not a single ounce of rational thinking or acting in the lot of them.”¹⁰ And Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, writing for the Catholic World, said that New York always had room “for such pleasant comedies” without any “cross or disagreeable” characters.¹¹

There is no evidence that Kaufman and Hart deliberately conceived of You Can't Take It with You as a reply to Awake and Sing!, that they set out to convert Odets' basic situation, that of the middle-class New York family trapped by the Depression, into a farce comedy. But, whether by design or by accident, there are a number of echoes in the second play, and at one major point the lines of force emanating from these plays intersect. (To raise one minor detail, consider the names that Kaufman and Hart give mother and daughter. Whereas for Odets their names had been Bessie and Hennie, Kaufman and Hart call them Penny and Essie.)

It is a curious circumstance, however, that the titles of the two plays may be considered to be almost interchangeable. You Can't Take It with You, which is a jazzy restatement of the carpe diem theme, is what Jacob preaches and Ralph learns—that the making of money is not the end of man. Jacob's ironical comment on Uncle Morty's materialistic views is: “Don't live—just make success.” Ralph leaves the insurance money to his mother, and vows: “Let me die like a dog, if I can't get more from life.” Hennie and Moe, fleeing the Bronx for their tropical paradise, may be judged to be socially irresponsible, but they have made the decision to live life on their own terms. Conversely, also, the injunction to awake and sing is exactly what the uninhibited members of the Vanderhof household have obeyed—they not only sing, but they dance, perform on the xylophone, make candy, paint, write plays, throw darts, feed snakes and visit zoos and commencements, make firecrackers in the basement, and in general practice the twin gospels of total relaxation and total individualism. What is significant about both plays, seen in this light, is that, in their own ways—one melodramatic, the other farcical—each examines the quality of American life, its values, its ideals, its actual practice and its apparent breakdown in the thirties.

The Berger family is full of tensions, frustrations and rivalries. “Everybody hates, nobody loves,” is the way Jacob characterizes the situation. The home is the place to escape from. But the Martin Vanderhof home is a haven—not only for the immediate members of the family but for Rheba, the cook; her boy friend Donald; Mr. De Pinna, the iceman who has just happened to stay for eight years; Mr. Kolenkhov, the Russian ballet teacher; and all others who fall under its spell. Everyone seems to have adopted Grandpa Vanderhof's laissez-faire philosophy; and the rampant individualism, not to say anarchy, of the household where each does as he will produces happiness and peace with the world.

To be sure, this peace is attained only by resolutely ignoring the outside world. As Grandpa says at grace: “… all we ask is just to go along and be happy in our own sort of way.” When that world occasionally intrudes, in the form of an Internal Revenue agent or Mr. and Mrs. Kirby, prospective members by marriage of the happy clan, the outside values are shown up as illogical and pointless; and at the end of the play, Mr. Kirby is revealed to be a frustrated saxophone player who has never really enjoyed making money on Wall Street, but who, unlike Grandpa, has lacked the good sense to “sign off” and start living. The Vanderhof values triumph over or convert the outside world.

The philosophic grandfathers who dominate the actions of both plays express apparently contrasting principles of conduct. Jacob's first statement is: “If this life leads to a revolution it's a good life. Otherwise it's nothing.” Grandpa Vanderhof says: “Life's pretty simple if you just relax.” But Odets undercuts his characterization of Jacob by calling him “a sentimental idealist with no power to turn ideal into action”; and the truth about Grandpa Vanderhof is that his strength and calm assurance derive precisely from the fact that he long ago made the crucial decision to turn his ideal into action—to leave the business world in favor of living and, in a strong Thoreauvian echo, having “time to notice when spring comes around.” Fundamentally, their diagnoses of what is wrong with the world are identical: it is the old “late and soon, getting and spending” syndrome. Jacob rejects a life that is “printed on dollar bills” because it lacks dignity; Grandpa rejects it because it's no fun. “Do what is in your heart and you carry in yourself a revolution,” cries Jacob—but this exhortation is closer to Emerson than to Marx.

It is at this point that the lines of force intersect. The ostensibly realistic “socially-conscious” drama and the extravagantly nonsensical farce are both expressions of the irrepressible American idealism that constantly lurks just below the surface of our brazen materialism. Idealism—and sentimental optimism as well. Ralph's final speech concludes vigorously: “I want the whole city to hear it—fresh blood, arms. We got 'em. We're glad we're living.” Grandpa Vanderhof's final grace is more restrained, but along the same lines: “We want to say thanks once more for everything You've done for us. Things seem to be going along fine. … We've all got our health and as far as anything else is concerned, we'll leave it to You.”

It is not surprising that these plays were popular and successful in 1935 and 1936. Both are basically consolatory and sentimental comedies, restating a familiar and acceptable American principle: namely, the integrity of the individual and his right to rear back and assert himself. The terms of assertion are different in these two plays, but the underlying theme, evoked by the times, is identical. At a time when the individual seemed to be helpless and at the mercy of impersonal and powerful economic forces, the theme of individual dignity and freedom must be reckoned as a criticism of existing conditions and as an American ideal too important to be lost sight of.

Notes

1. Joseph Freeman (ed.), Proletarian Literature in the United States (New York, 1935), p. 264.

2. The indispensable history of the Group Theatre is Harold Clurman's The Fervent Years (New York, 1957).

3. Burns Mantle (ed.), The Best Plays of 1934-35 New York, 1935), p. 236.

4. Clurman, p. 140.

5. Ibid., p. 160.

6. New York Times, December 20, 1936.

7. New York Times, December 15, 1936.

8. George Jean Nathan, “Art of the Night,” Saturday Review, May 8, 1937, p. 19.

9. Grenville Vernon, in Commonweal, December 25, 1936, p. 249.

10. Edith J. R. Isaacs, “Broadway in Review,” Theatre Arts Monthly, Fall 1937, pp. 96-97.

11. Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, in Catholic World, Fall 1937, pp. 597-98. Her review of Awake and Sing! had begun: “The Bergers are such a very unattractive family!” In succeeding capsule summaries of the current Broadway plays, she continued to use “disagreeable” as the characterizing adjective.