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Lisa Traiger has been writing about theater and dance since 1985. Currently she contributes a weekly dance column to The Washington Post Weekend section. Her pieces on the cultural and performing arts appear regularly in the Washington Jewish Week and DanceViewTimes.com. She has also written for Moment magazine, Stagebill, Sondheim Review, Asian Week, the Boston Jewish Advocate, the Atlanta Jewish Times, Intermission and the Washington Review. A recipient of two Simon Rockower Awards for Excellence in Arts Criticism from the American Jewish Press Association, she recently earned an M.F.A. in choreography from the University of Maryland, College Park. In 2003, Ms. Traiger was a New York Times Fellow in the Institute for Dance Criticism at the American Dance Festival, Durham, N.C. e-mail : lisatraiger@aol.com  

Clifford Odets was, perhaps, America's first street poet. He didn't idealize his nation for its broad and expansively beautiful landscapes like Walt Whitman. He didn't pen rhymed couplets or sonnets of passionate love. Odets listened hard to working-class American voices and found inspiration and purpose in the lives of downtrodden Depression-era bootstrappers.

And when he was just 28, this son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, wrote his first, and arguably best, play of his career: Awake and Sing.

This month, Arena Stage's Kreeger has resuscitated this little-seen American masterwork under the brilliantly detailed direction of Arena founding artistic director Zelda Fichandler, who has been absent from the theater's stages for nearly a decade.

What a welcome home this grande dame of regional theater will receive with this sharply etched production.

Odets wrote kitchen-table dramas that concerned struggling families eking out meager existences while trying to live morally upright lives. Awake and Sing is the prototype of this highly muscular dialogic display.

His characters are gritty, high-spirited, rough-hewn folk, who work hard and want more then they can get. Their conversations are sharp-tongued, slang-filled, richly punctuated and argumentative. This, Odets understood, is how the real folk talk. Nothing like Noel Coward's slick, upper-crust characters.

Like his unionizing Waiting for Lefty, his sprawling family drama Paradise Lost and his edgily neurotic Rocket to the Moon, Awake and Sing wears its heart on its sleeve. Sure, Odets' plot lines and characters are anything but subtle, but, in 1935 when the play debuted on Broadway, it ran a respectable 184 performances.

A member of the famed Group Theater, New York's incredibly influential troupe of actors, directors and writers, which included Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, Stella Adler and her brother, Luther, Sanford Meisner and Elia Kazan, Odets wrote best about what he knew ‹ working-class families.

And, as Fichandler and her dynamic cast demonstrate, he knew working-class New York Jewish immigrant life from the inside out. Awake and Sing weaves a close-knit Jewish family into a tale of prophetic struggle to overcome the classist, capitalist society that young dreamer Ralph sees as hampering him.

It's an age-old tale of American dreams and dashed hopes. The Berger family, ruled by impeccable homemaker Bessie (tough-as-nails, but fiercely loving Jan Robbins), lives on the edge. It's the Bronx, N.Y., 1935, and the Depression has ravaged the nation .there's small talk of industrialists jumping from buildings rather than facing their economic demise.

In that backdrop, the Berger family struggles on. Beside Ma, there's an ineffectual Pop, mild-mannered, bald-pated Steve Routman, who seems to have lost his drive along with his hair.

Hennie, the couple's unmarried daughter, is a looker, dark-haired and shapely. She dreams of being swept off her feet by a fairy-tale Prince Charming dressed in a well-pressed Arrow shirt. Miriam Silverman gives Hennie a peppery, jittery finish that's just right.

Younger brother Ralph complains that he never had a pair of skates to call his own, yet he dreams like a rich man ‹ of making it big as a tap dancer, a pilot, a Hollywood movie star. Arena newcomer Adam Green fills Ralph with aching desire and a coffee-ground-bitter despair.

He's also Jacob's favorite grandson. As the grizzled family patriarch, nearly as emasculated as his son-in-law by overbearing Bessie, brilliant Robert Prosky turns in a finely modulated performance. In a cramped two-bedroom flat, his prophetic voice warbles on touting Marxist ideals in a capitalist-crazed household. He's a visionary without an audience, a muted prophet, and, ultimately, as Odets' mouthpiece in the play, his statement comes as too little, too late.

Finally, fiery neighbor and eventual boarder Moe Axelrod, a wounded vet with a yen for Hennie, adds heat to the simmering discontent in this tightly wound household. Adam Dannheisser plays Moe with an urgency that throbs as incessantly as his amputated leg. Among a brilliant cast, Dannheisser stands out for his seething, drawn-from-the-gut performance.

Set designer Andromache Chalfant's dining and living room, all dark wood and heavy furniture, recalls a 1930s city apartment. The pair of portraits, sepia-toned stock ancestors recalling Eastern European shtetl life, suggests, along with the casual Yiddish repartee, that this family's roots in America are newly planted, particularly Bessie and Jacob. Chalfant also fills the orchestra pit with discarded furniture and detritus of 1930s life, laying bare the cruel results of an epidemic of evictions.

Interestingly, Fichandler chose to revive Odets' use of Yiddish, which the playwright had dropped from the original Broadway run. She sought out an original version of the script housed in the Library of Congress's collection to reinstate the Old Country phrases. And the actors appear to handle the conversations and expressive exclamations of mamaloshen with aplomb. Fichandler thus returns the homespun vernacular to this quintessentially Jewish family, something that was very likely worrisome for Odets and the Group Theatre to consider in 1935 on Broadway.

The Bergers still have bread, fruit, even a Sunday dinner of duck, but they long for so much more. Ralph says it right off the bat: "All I want is a chance to get to first base."

Odets understood deeply the ravages that poverty imparts on families. His Depression-era message rings true and prescient even today. America has, of course, a new wave of immigrant strivers, who, along with their children, are opting for a better life. And equally so, America is still filled with dreamers who want to make it big, in Hollywood, on the field, in the game courts or boardrooms of business.

Awake and Sing revivifies those stories for a new century, and that staunchly American story ‹ of optimism even in the face of the grinding banality of the everyday work ethic ‹ remains.

Awake and Sing first came to us at a time when artists, actors, dramatists sought to change the world. Fichandler and Arena Stage bring the play back at a time when our nation and the world need those creative voices and spirits to effect those necessary changes. Don't miss it.

Awake and Sing is onstage through March 5 at Arena Stage in the District. Tickets, $41-$60, are available by calling 202-488-3300.

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