STAGE LEFT.(Clifford Odets, American Playwright)(Book review)

On April 17th, to mark the centennial of the birth of the playwright Clifford Odets, Lincoln Center Theatre will open a new production of "Awake and Sing!," Odets's first full-length play and the one that made him a literary superstar in 1935, at the age of twenty-eight. In the years that followed, this magazine dubbed Odets "Revolution's No. 1 Boy"; Time put his face on its cover; Cole Porter rhymed his name in song (twice); and Walter Winchell coined the word "Bravodets!" "Of all people, you Clifford Odets are the nearest to understand or feel this American reality," his friend the director Harold Clurman wrote in 1938, urging him "to write, write, write--because we need it so much." "You are the Man," Clurman told him.

Odets died, of colon cancer, on August 14, 1963, a month after his fifty-seventh birthday. Nine weeks later, in a high-ceilinged hall above a kosher restaurant, Elia Kazan, the artistic director of the newly minted Lincoln Center Repertory, convened the first rehearsal of the company's first play, Arthur Miller's "After the Fall." As Kazan rose to address the gathered theatricals--among them Miller himself, who had been influenced by Odets's "unashamed word joy"--Odets was much on his mind. Throughout the early thirties, Kazan and Odets, as members of the Group Theatre, had been sidekicks and disgruntled warriors in the same artistic battles. Kazan had shared Odets's dreams of greatness and of change; they had also shared a railroad flat on West Fifty-seventh Street--the apartment, "saturated with disappointment," Kazan later said, where Odets wrote "Awake and Sing!," in a room so small that his typewriter, which he nicknamed Ambition Corona, had to rest on his lap. Kazan had been among the players who shouted "Strike, strike, strike!" at the finale of "Waiting for Lefty," Odets's one-act agitprop salvo heard around the world in 1935. He had appeared in Odets's first Broadway hit, "Golden Boy," and in his last play for the Group Theatre, "Night Music." He had also been a regular visitor in Hollywood, where Odets spent the last two decades of his life writing screenplays that he referred to as "fudge" and "candy pie," and, in films such as "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957) and plays, later made into movies, such as "The Big Knife" (1949) and "The Country Girl" (1950), mining the legend of his own collapse.

"The tragedy of our times in the theatre is the tragedy of Clifford Odets," Kazan began, before defending his late friend against the accusations of failure that had appeared in his obituaries. "His plan, he said, was to . . . come back to New York and get [some new] plays on. They'd be, he assured me, the best plays of his life. . . . Cliff wasn't 'shot.' . . . The mind and talent were alive in the man." On his deathbed, at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, according to Kazan, Odets had "raised his fist for the last time in his characteristic, self-dramatizing way and said, 'Clifford Odets, you have so much still to do!' "

Odets had not always resisted the notion of death. By the time he was twenty-five, he had tried to kill himself three times. He was a man of intemperate romantic emotion, haunted by a sense of doom and of transcendence. "I am homeless wherever I go, always lonely," he wrote at the height of his early fame, in his fascinating 1940 journal, published under the title "The Time Is Ripe."

The first child of three, he was born in 1906, in Philadelphia, to ill-matched first-generation immigrant parents. Pearl Geisinger had emigrated from Romania when she was eight. At sixteen, she was married off to Lou Odets, a pathological powerhouse from Russia, whose cocksureness was contradicted by the modesty of his achievement. Sixteen months later, Pearl gave birth to Clifford. Her life was a history of abdication and lamentation. Trapped, voiceless, and chronically exhausted by her children--her second child, Genevieve, was crippled by polio--Pearl salted away pennies from her family allowance for an "escape fund," which she kept in her sewing basket. (By the time she died, in 1935, she had amassed the considerable sum of three thousand dollars.) "Make a break or spend the rest of your life in a coffin," a character in "Awake and Sing!" pleads to his unhappily married lover. In the play, the woman leaves her family to claim her desires; Pearl never did. Instead, she incarcerated herself at home, cleaning obsessively (she was ...