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While Eugene O’Neill’s
naturalistic plays paved the way for the proletarian
dramas of the Thirties, the ease of his dialogue and his
intimate knowledge of the settings, not to mention his
tragic vision, achieved a poignancy that his sermonizing
successors could never reach. Nevertheless, the
established playwright Elmer Rice won the Pulitzer Prize
in 1929 for Street Scene, an artlessly moving
drama that utilized a New York City tenement block, and
went on to the more strident We the People (1933)
and Judgment Day (1934), which were among the more
effective agit-prop (agitation-propaganda) plays. It was,
however, a new voice that best mirrored the radical
aspirations in the theatre of the 1930s. Clifford Odets
(1906-1963) was acclaimed by both the critics and the
revolutionary vanguard alike for Waiting for Lefty
(1935), based on the New York taxi cab strike of the
preceding year, with the action laid in a union hall.
This success prompted the staging in 1935 of his earlier
Awake and Sing, his most personal and touching
play, set in the Jewish ghetto. It was produced by The
Group Theatre, founded in New York in 1931, a company
that produced contemporary plays dealing with social
issues. With the Group Theatre also mounting Till the
Day I Die, one of the first anti-Nazi dramas, Odets
had three plays running simultaneously on Broadway and
aroused more discussion than any American dramatist since
O’Neill. Golden Boy (1937), about a young
man who gives up his career as a violinist to ruin his
hands in the boxing ring, was a popular success that has
had a number of revivals.
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Introduction
