Clifford Odets

Clifford Odets, born July 18, 1906, and died August 14, 1963, worked as an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor. During the mid-1930s, many considered him the likely heir to Nobel winner Eugene O'Neill, who was then stepping back from Broadway due to commercial demands and growing critical disapproval. Starting in January 1935, Odets's socially conscious plays carried major influence, especially through the rest of the Great Depression. His work shaped later generations of dramatists, among them Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayefsky, Neil Simon, and David Mamet.

After his play Clash by Night ran in the 1941–42 season, Odets shifted mostly to film work, staying in Hollywood until mid-1948. He then returned to New York for five and a half years, staging three more Broadway plays, only one of which succeeded. Eventually, his prominence faded as Miller, Tennessee Williams, and, by the early to mid-1950s, William Inge took the spotlight.

Early years

Odets was born in Philadelphia to Louis J. Odets (born Leib Gorodetsky) and Pearl Geisinger, immigrants from Russia and Romania, and grew up in Philadelphia and the Bronx, New York. He left high school after two years to pursue acting and writing. He threw himself into acting with energy and resourcefulness. At nineteen, he went out on his own, calling himself "The Rover Reciter," entering talent contests and getting work as a radio elocutionist.

He performed in several plays with Harry Kemp's Poet's Theatre on the Lower East Side. Around this time, he became one of America's first disc jockeys, at Manhattan stations like WBNY, playing records and improvising commentary. He also worked as a drama critic, which got him free entry to Broadway and downtown shows. Through this, he saw the 1926 Broadway production of Seán O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, which strongly influenced him.

Theater

In the early 1920s, Odets spent four summers as a dramatics counselor at Jewish camps in the Catskills and the Poconos. He toured widely with stock companies, especially Philadelphia's Mae Desmond Company, playing many character roles at their theater in Chester, Pennsylvania. His first Broadway break came in 1929, when he was cast in two small roles and as understudy to the young Spencer Tracy in Warren F. Lawrence's Conflict. That fall, he got his first job with the prestigious Theatre Guild as an extra.

Between 1929 and 1931, he acted in small roles in several Guild productions. There, he befriended casting director Cheryl Crawford. She suggested that Harold Clurman, then a play reader for the Guild, invite Odets to a meeting about new theater ideas they were developing with Lee Strasberg. Though initially puzzled by the idea of acting as an art, Odets was captivated by Clurman's talks and became the last actor chosen for the Group Theatre's first summer rehearsals in June 1931 at Brookfield Center in Connecticut, making him a founding member.

The Group Theatre became one of the most influential companies in American stage history. It was the first in the U.S. to base its work on an acting technique from Russian actor and director Constantin Stanislavski, later developed by Group director Lee Strasberg into what became known as The Method or Method Acting. From the start, Odets got only small roles and understudy parts. He understudied lead actor Luther Adler in the Group's production of John Howard Lawson's Success Story during the 1932–33 season.

Adler never missed a performance, frustrating Odets, but Odets learned much about playwriting by standing in the wings and listening. He credited Lawson with showing him the theatrical power of everyday speech. With free time and at Clurman's urging, Odets began writing his own plays.

His earliest plays were an autobiographical piece, 910 Eden Street, and one about his hero Beethoven, with the working title Victory. Clurman dismissed both as immature but encouraged Odets to keep writing, steering him toward familiar subjects. In late 1932, Odets started a play about a middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx, initially called I Got the Blues.

He worked hard on it, sharing drafts with Clurman and promising parts to fellow actors—often the same parts. While at Green Mansions, the Group's 1933 summer rehearsal venue in Warrensburg, New York, the company performed Act II of the play, soon retitled Awake and Sing!, for other camp residents. The audience loved it, but the Group's leadership, especially Strasberg, still opposed producing it.

Until his debut as a playwright, Odets kept training as an actor with the Group at various summer rehearsal sites in Connecticut and upstate New York. Besides Brookfield Center and Green Mansions, these included Dover Furnace in Dutchess County (1932) and a large house in the Catskill village of Ellenville (1934). The Group spent the summer of 1936 at Pine Brook Country Club in Fairfield County, Connecticut.

Its final summer retreat was at Lake Grove, in Smithtown, New York, in 1939. Odets's exposure to Strasberg's philosophy was key to his growth as a playwright. Late in life, he said in an interview, "My chief influence as a playwright was the Group Theatre acting company, and being a member of that company... And you can see the Group Theatre acting technique crept right into the plays." Odets became the first produced Method-trained playwright with his first publicly presented play, a one-act.