Analysis of Awake and Sing as a Revolutionary Play

Each play of Odets proves that he was a committed Marxist. He wrote to propagate the message in favour of the masses and tried to pinpoint their miseries, troubles and tribulations in living their everyday existence. Odets was a man with a mission and his plays burned with furious intensity and conveyed spirit of the suppressed sufferers of the society. His characters clamour for justice and fight for their rights. In mid-Depression period, America was beginning to be a sterile country as far as literary output was concerned. It was at that time that Odets produced his powerful play Awake and Sing. It was a social play and dealt with the social and economic problems. It conveyed the message of protest against the Capitalists and portrayed the problems of abused and frustrated middle class professionals who suffer from the corruption in social institutions, business and government. Through his revolutionary plays, he structured the plays as a series of brief vignettes, each of which spotlights certain individuals and shows how their problems reflect the larger conflict which forms the framework of the plays.