The title of the Clifford Odets play now at the Focus is taken from Isaiah: Awake and sing, ye who dwell in dust. The dust here is the fall-out from the American depression of the early 1930s and the dwellers an impoverished Jewish family in New York's Bronx district.
There are five of them living in a cramped apartment: mother Bessie and father Myron, maternal grandfather Jacob, son Ralph and daughter Hennie in their early twenties. They have squeezed in a lodger, Moe, to help pay the bills. He lost a leg in the war and has a yen for Hennie.
It's a tough, bottom-of-the-barrel life for all of them, and when Hennie becomes pregnant from a fleeting encounter it gets worse. Bessie, the archetypal Jewish mother, marries her off swiftly to a naive bachelor. She also strangles Ralph's impulses towards any kind of independence or romance. Survival is the name of the only game she knows.
Uncle Morty, a predatory businessman, is Bessie's brother, and gets involved in the family's affairs without helping very much. Sam, Hennie's confused husband, flounders helplessly around, sensing without understanding the wasteland that is now his life.
In some ways, the play has aged, partly because aspects of its characters and situations have been imitated and repeated, and the dialogue has become dated since it first app eared in 1935. But its under lying strengths prevail. These are people easy to believe in and care about, and the closing notes of new hope and vision are heart-warming.
Brian de Salvo's sensitive direction focuses primarily on the acting, which is in depth.
Paul Bennett's submissive Myron is a comic delight, Ann Russell Weakley comes across as a convincing Bessie, David Johnston and Jackie Nugent are appealing as Ralph and Hennie, Brent Hearne is a suitably cynical Moe, Guy Carleton a sharp Morty, Frank McDonald the still idealistic grandfather and Robert McDowell the weak husband. Together they maintain the dramatic thrust to the end.
This is the kind of play to which the Focus are, in their general style and orientation, natural heirs, and they perform it with distinction.
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