SOURCE: "Remaking Mankind," in The New Yorker, Vol. 60, March 19, 1984, p. 116.

Gill is an American novelist, short story writer, and critic. In the following review, he pans a modern production of Odets's Awake and Sing! and wonders if the work has been lost to history.

Innumerable plays have earned recognition in histories of the stage but are no longer readily producible on a stage, and I have the impression that Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing! may be one of them. I call it an impression, and not a conviction, because nobody could possibly judge the value of the play, either as a work deserving a certain place in history or as a source of entertainment to contemporary audiences, by the ramshackle version of it that is currently on view at the Circle in the Square. Odets finished the play when he was twenty-eight, early in 1935; that was his annus...