NEW YORK, N.Y —First of all, you have to know that "Awake and Sing!" is not a musical. It’s Clifford Odets’ grim drama about a Jewish family struggling through the Depression.  The Big One that enveloped the country in the 1930s, not just the collective despair that hangs over this family like a mushroom cloud.

 

Three generations of the Berger family, a collective of emotionally claustrophobic losers, are bundled together in a single apartment in the Bronx.  At the center is Bessie, played by a tight-lipped Zoe Wanamaker.  Surrounding her is her ineffectual husband Myron (Jonathan Hadary), her angry and rebellious daughter Hennie (Lauren Ambrose), her son Ralph (Pablo Schreiber), and their old Marxist grandfather played by Ben Gazzara.  There is also a gangster/boarder, a bad imitation of George Raft, clunkily played by Mark Ruffalo.

 

 Unlike the hilariously eccentric family of “You Can’t Take It With You” that appeared on Broadway a few years later, the Bergers are strikingly ordinary and obsessively troubled.  Rather like a “Long Day’s Journey” for Jews.  Except that, frankly, this revival might have felt more authentic if it had a few more Jews in the cast.

 

Lauren Ambrose, she of the flaming red hair, who was so luminous as the conflicted Claire Fisher in “Six Feet Under” here is miscast as Hennie.  Lifeless and stiff, she evokes little compassion as the pregnant daughter forced into a loveless marriage with a poor nebbish played by Richard Topol.

 

And Ben Gazzara as the grandfather, Jake, might have been okay (after all, Italians and Jews are pretty much interchangeable) if he had actually played the role, rather than phoning it in.  Offering pithy wisdom and snippets of outdated political philosophy, Gazzara never displayed a scintilla of emotion, speaking all his lines in a flat, detached monotone.  You had to wonder whether this usually marvelous actor had laryngitis or whether he just didn’t give a damn.

 

Holding the show together (and the only real reason to pay the $100 per ticket) were Zoe Wanamaker and Pablo Schreiber, who invested their roles with the requisite passion and authority.  Schreiber, a long skinny drink of water, uses his height to emphasize that he is too tall for the  confines of the crowded apartment.  Absorbed in a hopeless (and chaste) love affair, he is talked out of it by his possessive mother, whose only motive seems to be that she needs his paltry salary for household expenses.

 
|Wanamaker plays Bessie as alternately ruthless and vulnerable, ordering the lives of her hapless family and displaying her fears for their future.  Tied to a well-meaning wimp of a husband and a son who will never have much of a life, she is stuck, like all women of her time, in a thankless, hopeless dead-end.  Not for her the exhortations of her father Jake to “awake and sing!”  Yet, surprisingly, those words are taken up by Ralph, who idolizes his grandfather and, in the end, begins to look to the future with hope.

 

And here I must add a word about Ned Eisenberg, who is the best thing in this eventful play.  He plays Bessie’s brother Morty, a successful businessman, with just exactly the right Jewish gestures and bounce.  Full of brash humor and self-confidence, he reminds us that this is, after all, a Jewish family, with all the insular pride that that entails.

 
This production, directed by Bartlett Sher, is currently being presented at the Belasco Theatre, where it originally premiered in 1935.  At that time legendary theater critic Brooks Atkinson, writing in the New York Times, wrote that “Awake and Sing!in spite of its frenzy is inexplicably deficient in plain, theatre emotion.  There is something unyielding at the core of the play.” That comment is, unfortunately, still true today.

In this revival, Sher and set designer Michael Yeargan have added an additional dimension to the play by having pieces of the background scenery disappear with each succeeding act.  Supposedly it represents the emotional unveiling of each member of the family, but it is highly distracting and doesn’t quite work.  Except for the snowfall that ends the show. And Ralph’s momentary awakening to hope.