Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing!

Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing! is a new Broadway production of a family drama that Clifford Odets began writing in the early 1930s and that was first produced in 1935. It is a straight play, not a musical. Its subject is the Berger family of the Bronx, three generations living on top of one another in a small tenement apartment while the Great Depression leaves them almost nothing to spare. Their quarrels are about money, marriage, respectability and whether anyone in the household will ever get to choose a life of their own.

Manhattan Theatre Club produces this revival as part of its 2026–27 season at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. It is the fifth time the play has returned to Broadway since its premiere, and it is the Broadway directing debut of Tyne Rafaeli. As of October 2026, five principal performers had been announced: Jessica Hecht, Jeremy Shamos, Micaela Diamond, Will Pullen and Danny Burstein.

The play's place in theater history rests partly on two firsts. It was the first full-length Odets script to reach production, and together with his one-act Waiting for Lefty it made him the house playwright of the Group Theatre, the company that premiered it. It has also been called the first Broadway play devoted entirely to a Jewish family. Its previous Broadway revival, in 2006, won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.

The Bergers live in Longwood, a neighborhood in the Bronx, in the hard years of the 1930s. Myron Berger is the father and, on paper, the head of the house, but the person who actually runs things is his wife, Bessie. Their two grown children still live at home: Hennie, who is 26, and Ralph, who is 21. So does Bessie's father, Jacob, a Marxist.

A handful of other people drift in and out of the apartment. Uncle Morty, Bessie's brother, is a prosperous businessman. Moe Axelrod is a friend of the Bergers who ends up renting a room from them. Sam Feinschreiber, an immigrant, is courting Hennie. Schlosser looks after the building as its janitor.

What drives Bessie more than anything is fear. The family has very little, and she has watched a neighbor lose a home and every possession in it. She is determined that will not happen to the Bergers. Both parents try to direct Hennie's and Ralph's lives, including whom they love, toward whatever serves the family as a whole, while the children want to make those choices themselves.

The tension sharpens when it becomes clear that Hennie is expecting a baby. To protect the family's good name, Bessie maneuvers her into marrying Sam, a man Hennie does not love. Ralph objects. He takes after his grandfather, the household's idealist, and he wants to choose his own way rather than accept one chosen for him. The play holds those two pulls against each other: the wish for a life of one's own, and the hard arithmetic of a household with too little money.

Odets, born in Philadelphia and raised partly in the Bronx, started the script in late 1932. His working title was I Got the Blues, and his first idea was a portrait of a middle-class Jewish household in that borough.

There is no long setup: the play opens in the middle of the action, and its dialogue is heightened and stylized rather than naturalistic. The 1935 Random House edition presents it as a play in three acts.

Beneath the family quarrels, the play returns again and again to a few big questions. How much should people give up in order to look respectable to the neighbors? Can idealism survive daily contact with practical need? And how does money, or the lack of it, bend the way people treat the ones they love?

Among Odets's other plays are Golden Boy, The Flowering Peach, Paradise Lost, The Big Knife, Rocket to the Moon and Clash by Night, and his screen work includes Sweet Smell of Success. Two more Odets revivals were announced for fall 2026: Josh O'Connor in Golden Boy at London's Almeida Theatre, and Classic Stage Company's Waiting for Lefty in New York.

Manhattan Theatre Club, led by Artistic Director Nicki Hunter and Executive Director Chris Jennings, is the lead producer, in association with Brian and Dayna Lee and with Nicole and Stephanie Kramer. The company's 2026–27 Broadway season at the Friedman also includes School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play in the fall and the world premiere of David Hare's Montauk, with Laura Linney, in spring 2027.

As of October 2026, Jessica Hecht plays Bessie Berger, Jeremy Shamos plays Myron Berger, Micaela Diamond plays Hennie Berger, Will Pullen plays Ralph Berger and Danny Burstein plays Uncle Morty. Casting for Jacob, Moe Axelrod, Sam Feinschreiber and Schlosser had not yet been announced.

This revival is Burstein's 23rd Broadway production. As of October 2026, he had received nine Tony nominations, including one in 2026 for Marjorie Prime, and one win, in 2020, as a featured actor in Moulin Rouge! The Musical. Hecht had three Tony nominations, for A View from the Bridge, Summer, 1976 and Eureka Day, as well as an Emmy nomination for the Netflix series Special.

Shamos was Tony-nominated for Clybourne Park. Diamond, who made her Broadway debut in The Cher Show, earned Tony and Grammy nominations for playing Lucille Frank in Parade. Pullen made his Broadway debut in Sweat and played Jem in To Kill a Mockingbird. Hecht has shared a Broadway stage with Burstein before, in Fiddler on the Roof, and with Shamos in Manhattan Theatre Club's The Assembled Parties.

The road to the first production was slow. In summer 1933, Group Theatre members staged the second act for fellow guests at Green Mansions, the company's summer rehearsal camp in Warrensburg, New York. The Group's leadership, and Lee Strasberg in particular, still chose not to produce it. That changed only after Waiting for Lefty succeeded. The one-act was first performed on January 6, 1935, and by the following month the Group had the full-length play on a Broadway stage.

Awake and Sing! opened on February 19, 1935, at the Belasco Theatre, with Harold Clurman directing and Boris Aronson designing the set. The cast included Stella Adler as Bessie, John Garfield as Ralph, Morris Carnovsky as Jacob, Luther Adler as Moe and Sanford Meisner as Sam. The run lasted until July 27, 1935 (184 performances), and a return engagement in September added 24 more, for 208 in all.

Broadway revivals followed on December 22, 1938, at Daly's 63rd Street Theatre; on March 7, 1939, at the Windsor Theatre; and on March 8, 1984, at Circle in the Square Theatre. In 2006, a hundred years after Odets was born, Lincoln Center Theater returned the play to the Belasco Theatre under Bartlett Sher, with Ben Gazzara, Zoë Wanamaker, Mark Ruffalo, Pablo Schreiber and Lauren Ambrose in the cast. That production opened on April 17, 2006, and played 80 performances before closing on June 25, 2006.

Away from Broadway, Glasgow Unity Theatre in Scotland chose it for its very first production in January 1941, and New York saw Off-Broadway revivals in 1970, 1979, 1993 and 1995. Walter Matthau played Moe in a PBS television version that aired on March 6, 1972. Zelda Fichandler's 2006 staging at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., brought back Yiddish from the I Got the Blues draft, and Stockard Channing was Bessie at London's Almeida Theatre in 2007. A 2013 New York production by National Asian American Theatre Company cast the play entirely with Asian actors; Mia Katigbak's Bessie earned her an Obie, and the staging returned at the Public Theater in 2015.

For its revival at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club scheduled the first preview for December 15, 2026, and opening night for January 7, 2027.