SOURCE: "Ark Angels," in The New Yorker, April 4, 1994, pp. 94-6.

John Lahr is an American author of both fiction and nonfiction, a playwright, and a critic. In the following excerpt, he reviews a 1992 performance of The Flowering Peach and gives background on the play and Odets's reasons for writing it.

"Half-idealism is the peritonitis of the soul," says Hank Teagle, a character in Clifford Odets' The Big Knife—a play about Hollywood, where Odets moved from New York in 1936, in search of a big audience and big bucks. He lived with a moral malaise every subsequent day of his professional life. Odets died, of cancer, on August 14, 1963, when he was fifty-seven, and on his writing desk were two copies of Time. One was the December 5, 1938, issue, which had Odets on the cover as a wunderkind (between 1935 and 1939 he wrote seven plays, including Awake and Sing! Waiting for Lefty...