Awake and Sing!

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Seeing a show with Sea Dog Theater is a delightful experience. Everyone is lovely, from the ticket takers to the ushers to the artistic director who led the talkback after the show, where they served wine and charcuterie. Broadway producers should take note.

The Sea Dog Theater offering is Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing!, originally produced by the Group Theatre in 1935. Over the years, many boldface names have appeared in the show, including Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Ben Gazzara, Zoë Wanamaker, Walter Matthau, Ron Rifkin and Mark Ruffalo. The play is perhaps not as well known as Golden Boy, but it is fairly frequently revived on Broadway, most recently by Lincoln Center in 2006.

The play is about a Jewish family, the Bergers, who live together in a small apartment in the Bronx. The Sea Dog production features color blind casting, so almost every Berger is a different race or ethnicity. This could be jarring but as the play settles in it becomes a non-issue. It’s the play’s 90^th anniversary but many of the themes feel contemporary.

The family consists of the matriarch, Bessie (Debra Walton), her father Jacob (Gary Sloan), her husband Myron (Juan Carlos Diaz), her son Ralph (Trevor McGhie) and her daughter Hennie (Daisy Wang). Hennie eventually becomes pregnant and marries an immigrant named Sam (Sina Pooresmaeil), whom she doesn’t love. Despite being the patriarch, Myron is a fairly small part that doesn’t really drive the action. It’s more Bessie’s play, with key speeches by Jacob and Ralph. Later on Hennie’s story takes center stage.

It would not have been possible for the company to build a period accurate set so they don’t even try. The set, by production designer Guy De Lancey, is just a long table with an apple on it (the reason becomes clear by the end of the play). There are also four video screens in each corner of the stage, meant to emphasize how cramped the apartment is, which is important because the venue is a bit large. Fan Zhang does a nice job with the sound design (a fairly simple gig in this case but it’s important work) and Hanxiao Zhang provides serviceable costumes.

The Bronx accents are mostly well deployed; nobody overdoes it which is a danger in productions like these. It’s a pleasure to hear Odets’ words spoken by a strong cast – “A girl twenty-six don’t grow younger. When I was your age it was already a big family with responsibilities.” There’s music to these lines, and the cast is able to capture that.

Director Erwin Maas gets good performances out of his actors. As Bessie, Debra Walton is a nag and a pest; anyone with a mother will recognize her. Trevor McGhie is a philosophical Sam who wants more out of life than what the Bergers have to offer. (In an earlier version of the play his girlfriend was a non-Jew; I personally think that would have made more sense than just having her be poor.) Artistic director Christopher J. Domig does solid work as Moe, a non-Berger who figures prominently in all of their lives. (He also gets good lines like, “Don’t make me laugh – when I get married! What do I think of women? Take ’em all, cut ’em in little pieces like a herring in Greek salad. A guy in France had the right idea – dropped his wife in a bathtub fulla acid.”)

The production isn’t perfect. It drags a bit towards the end, and the choice to have no props can be distracting at times. For example, the phone rings a few times during the show, and in deciding not to use props (something Jamie Lloyd did in the recent Godot revival) they therefore did not have a physical phone. The actors take a pose when they answer, which mostly works internally but it might have been easier to just have an actual phone. To be fair, there are a lot of props in the show, and this choice may have been made for budgetary reasons.

Regardless, this is an opportunity to see a great play performed by professional actors and as I said, the entire experience offered by Sea Dog Theater is first rate.

Awake and Sing! (through November 8, 2025)

Sea Dog Theater, 209 East 16^th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.seadogtheater.org

Running time: 100 minutes without an intermission