As an active figure, conducive to sweat, clapping and partisanship, Mr. Odets may be in a short time an impressive dramatist. Already, without appearing to be middle-class and stupid, he gives the impression of convictions. And he does not give the impression of grabbing any movement or cause for its stage exploitation and jabber. I still say, I repeat, that, though to a much less degree in "Till the Day I Die" and "Waiting for Lefty" than in "Awake and Sing," he needs to establish the plane, indicate the measure, of his various motivations. Taking any of his situations, there is still room for a more important interpretation. The line of living, after the jungle has been superseded and left, is not so simple as in many of the speeches it may seem to be. To take a good example, we find one of Mr. Odets' characters speaking of an aged Jewish father, a man who has read Spinoza all his life—and look what they have done to him! It would be a more profound art in Mr. Odets—I am one who believes he will come to it (and this review is written for him)—if he showed us this character, too, this Spinoza-read old man. In sum it would better convince us of the motif intended if he created this spiritual aspect against which the material tides of circumstance beat so disastrously. In sum, we should have a greater and more significant range in character creation if we saw two men between whom there is not only the force of capitalism but also of Spinoza. Otherwise, this flinging of spiritual and musical culture into the scales is much too easy. Thrown in like that, Spinoza is, as theatre argument, not much more carrying than to say that the heroine ate spinach all her life and now the factory has spoiled her liver.
Since the earliest beginnings of drama, obviously, the great motifs or abstractions built on have been pretty much the same. Their application, as bases for definite situations or subjects, depends on the dramatists' discovery of what will arouse toward them the most powerful and complete response. On this basis, in "Till the Day I Die," the torturing of the Communist by the Nazis until he will be disgraced and lost, is no more than what happened, very likely, to plenty of aristocrats or bourgeois victims under the changed Russian system. You can like or not like, then, Mr. Odets' partisanships, so long as you remember that (setting aside the special appeal of his causes to this man or that) the test of his work lies in its emotional resources, its dialogue, the response it evokes. The test of his work lies in its theatrical powers and its human emotional powers, both of which are at their zeniths when one of them has been made inseparable from the other.
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