Clifford Odets (1906–1963) was an American dramatist associated with the Group Theatre and plays about people under economic and personal pressure. He was born in Philadelphia, grew up in the Bronx, and worked as an actor before his writing gained prominence. The New York Public Library holds scripts, journals and other papers documenting his development.
You can begin with plays including Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, Golden Boy, Rocket to the Moon, The Big Knife and The Country Girl. Golden Boy dates from 1937; The Country Girl reached Broadway in 1950. His career also extended into Hollywood screenwriting.
A writer working with an ensemble
Through the Group Theatre, you can investigate how a script emerges into a particular community of actors, directors and audiences. Lincoln Center Theater's Golden Boy teaching guide places Odets's work in the company's history and the conditions of the Depression.
For actors: Read an Odets scene as several people's efforts meeting in a room. A family member's demand can be protective, controlling, loving and materially necessary in different proportions. You gain more rehearsal options by investigating those proportions than by assigning one person the role of spokesperson for the play's message.
One concrete point of entry: Golden Boy
In Golden Boy, you encounter a conflict between Joe Bonaparte's ability as a violinist and his opportunities as a boxer. Both place demands on the same person... and on his hands. His relationships with his father, his manager and Lorna Moon make that conflict immediate. Lincoln Center's guide provides a plot outline and character descriptions for orientation.
Use that outline to orient your reading of the complete play. Before selecting a scene, establish what has already happened, what each person knows, and what later developments your character cannot yet anticipate. Keep the 1937 play distinct from the later musical adaptation when choosing an edition.
For your reading and rehearsal, consider these interpretations alongside the complete play.
Artistic work under material pressure
What do you gain by studying the violin and the boxing in Golden Boy as more than symbols? You meet two kinds of work making competing claims on the same body. Your hands, time, concentration and future cannot be promised to both without consequence. The conflict becomes specific when you ask what a particular relationship asks you to sacrifice and what it offers in return. An argument about success can then become a decision someone needs you to make.
You can hear a related demand in the ensemble writing. You need the person across the room to accept your account of what is possible. Hope may become an appeal; disappointment may become an accusation; affection may become an argument for staying. Those possibilities help you investigate the turns of a speech without smoothing its language into polite explanation. Read aloud for where a thought presses harder, changes direction or discovers a new image. Then identify who has to receive that change.
Odets's movement between New York theatre and Hollywood supplies another useful line of study. The NYPL record describes his screenwriting alongside his plays and preserves produced and unproduced work, notes and revisions. You can therefore approach him as a writer working within different production circumstances. A screenwriting credit and a stage text ask for different kinds of investigation. Before borrowing the rhythm of a film performance for a stage scene, return to the actual words and the conditions of this version. Your task is to make the writing in front of you active, with its particular pressures intact.
Working with the text
Try these independent study prompts with your chosen play.
- Choose one exchange after reading the complete script. Write down the concrete resources at stake: money, employment, housing, time, an opportunity, or access to another person. Use only those supported by the scene.
- Give each character an immediate objective. Replace a theme such as “the American dream” with a request the partner could accept or refuse.
- Mark a moment when that request fails. Try a different tactic while keeping the underlying need clear. Notice whether the text permits the change.
- Read the language aloud for its turns of thought. Which image intensifies an appeal? Where does a sentence interrupt itself? Try preserving that structure without forcing a uniform elevated delivery.
In a Golden Boy scene, investigate the physical specificity of Joe's competing skills separately from the argument he makes to another person. Bringing one informed physical detail back into the scene is an experiment; it does not establish that every line needs an illustration.
Related reading
Objective, Tactic, Craft, Externals.
Source for further study: The Clifford Odets papers at the New York Public Library.