Though “Awake and Sing!” takes place in the Depression-era Bronx, Ellen Ratner thinks Bay Area audiences today will relate to Clifford Odet’s 1935 stage classic.
Especially audiences wondering what the heck has happened to their 401(k) plans.
Ratner stars in the Aurora Theatre Company’s revival of “Awake and Sing!”, which launches a five-week run on Aug. 21. She plays Bessie, matriarch of the Berger clan and arguably the Jewish mother from hell.
The action of the play swirls around three generations of the family, and just how hard the hard times really were. One generation removed from the shtetl, Odets’ characters speak in a sharp, Yiddish-inflected Bronxese, full of moxie and streetwise humor.
It’s bold, too, especially for its era: Infidelity, petty crime, premarital sex and suicide all become plot points in Odets’ hands. And though the term “dysfunctional family” hadn’t yet been coined in 1935, Ratner’s character Bessie stands at the helm of a profoundly dysfunctional clan.
“She runs the show,” Ratner says. “She could be looked at as a tyrant, but also as a lover of life, a force of nature passionately keeping her family going during this horrible time.”
Her tyranny knows no bounds. Bessie lords it over her milquetoast husband, Myron, her kids — lovelorn Ralph and love-starved Hennie — and even her elderly father, Jacob, frail yet resolved in his vision of a utopian socialist future, a time when all shall “awake and sing.”
Odets, who died in 1963, never saw that utopia. He even worked against it when the one-time communist named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. But his early plays — “Waiting for Lefty” and “Golden Boy” among them — remain part of the canon of the American stage.
“Awake and Sing!” enjoyed a Tony Award–winning revival on Broadway two years ago. And now the Aurora takes it on, with veteran local director, teacher and actress Joy Carlin at the helm.
This isn’t Carlin’s first go-round with the Odets play. The Yale School of Drama graduate and Drama Circle Award winner first directed it for the Berkeley Repertory Theatre 24 years ago.
How will “Awake and Sing!” go over on the Aurora’s distinctive thrust stage?
“The audience will be like voyeurs,” Ratner says. “For that first row, their feet will be in the Berger residence. You will be in that living room and maybe smell the food we’ll be eating.”
Since many scenes feature the family around the dinner table (it is a Jewish play after all), Ratner is probably right about audiences smelling the brisket.
The actress claims a partial connection to the world of the Berger family. She was born in Queens, N.Y., to a Jewish father and Catholic mother, and later attended the famed High School of the Performing Arts.
She started out as a stand-up comic. One of her friends from those days, Larry David, went on to fame with “Seinfeld,” and he cast Ratner as a houseguest in “the dingo ate your baby” episode. She went on to land small roles in scores of sitcoms (“Frazier,” “The Nanny” and, most recently, “Ugly Betty”) and mount her own one-woman show that toured internationally.
Last fall, she relocated to the Bay Area, where she quickly plugged into the local theater scene. Earlier this year, she starred in San Francisco in the Jewish Theatre production of Woody Allen’s “A Floating Light Bulb,” in which she played an overbearing Jewish mother in New York.
Having been cast as Bessie in “Awake and Sing!”, Ratner seems to have cornered the market on that archetype. That’s OK with her as long as she lands the parts.
“I am always a gypsy,” she says. “I can’t sit still. I can’t wait for work to come to me.”
“Awake and Sing” plays Aug. 21 through Sept. 27 at Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. $15-$55. Information: (510) 843-4822 or www.auroratheatre.org.