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Among plays, many are copyrighted, but few are chosen. Of close to 5,000 registered with the Copyright Office each year, possibly 2,000 go the Broadway rounds, 500 receive serious consideration, 300 land their authors a contract. Of 100 to 200 that are produced, more than 75% flop, less than 10% become smash hits, two or three run into their second year, one wins a Pulitzer Prize.
Once a decade, by some freak, an Abie's Irish Rose or a Tobacco Road bobs up and refuses to sink for several seasons. Once a decade there may be an opening night, like that of What Price Glory? in 1924, when an audience stamps, shouts, weeps from excitement, and refuses to leave the theatre. Once a decade some young playwright who was yesterday unknown, not merely succeeds, but overnight arrives for good & all. Eugene O'Neill did it in the early twenties.
One Sunday night in January 1935 a one-act play about a taxi strike had its premiere in a shabby downtown Manhattan theatre. At its conclusion, a Left Wing audience put on the kind of demonstration that What Price Glory? had known, uptown, ten years before. The play was Waiting for Lefty, by Clifford Odets. Two months later. Lefty was running full blast in one Broadway theatre, Odets' Awake and Sing! in another, and critics were writing elaborate Sunday articles about the author. The Left theatre had become an exciting reality for people in no wise Left-minded, and when 28-year-old Odets was not being hailed as the Boy Wonder of the U. S. theatre, he was being acclaimed as its White Hope.
Since then he has written a flop—Paradise Lost; a popular success that Hollywood paid $75,000 for—Golden Boy. Critics have spanked him. The public has often been exasperated and puzzled. But his position remains unchallenged. Critics, after filing their complaints, hastily add that Odets is his country's most promising playwright. Waiting for Lefty has circled the globe. Odets is still the White Hope, still Art, still News.
The reason Odets has gained and held a public that, by & large, does not share his Leftish ideas is obviously not the ideas themselves but his rich, compassionate, angry feeling for people, his tremendous dramatic punch, his dialogue, bracing as ozone. In every Odets play, regardless of its theme or its worth, at least once or twice during the evening every spectator feels that a fire hose has been turned on his body, that a fist has connected with his chin.
Last week the Group Theatre produced Odets' sixth play, Rocket to the Moon. In Odets' own phrase, it is a play about middle-class love. Its people, running true to form, are frustrated, mired; but this time Society is not the villain.