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Stripped to the bone, Rocket to the Moon is a triangle play: the story of a kindly, thin-blooded, tired dentist (Morris Carnovsky) who has accepted life at prevailing odds, surrendered to routine, "gone to sleep." His bitter nagging wife and his sinister, mocking father-in-law (Luther Adler) appreciate his goodness, yet cannot help taunting him. From a romantic young girl (Eleanor Lynn) in his office who is fighting to live, do, go somewhere, and who loves him. he gets sympathy. Suddenly he finds himself in love with her. But when the showdown comes, he stays with his wife: not only because of conscience or past ties, but because he is too weary to wrench himself out of the old life and cope with the high-powered demands of the new.
Odets does not encase this eternal situation in the snug, tight frame of the well-made Broadway "domestic drama.'' Heaving, racked, volcanic, the play belches the hot subterranean lava of its characters' anger, helplessness, pain. It draws back their skin to leave every nerve exposed. In its best scenes Rocket to the Moon is blisteringly real, its dialogue forks and spits like lightning from a scornful sky.
Like Awake and Sing!, like Paradise Lost, like confusion itself, the new play does not move in a straight line. In his social-minded plays Odets has drawn people who are confused because a materialistic society pulls them one way, their instincts another. But in Rocket to the Moon psychological dislocations result from a clash of temperaments, a lack of drive. And Odets will not stay with his plot. He pursues a mystical theme which overrides it: the need for love to vitalize human lives. Inoculated with this virus, his characters cease to be individuals in a specific situation, turn into orators, poets, philosophers who halt the action to harpoon the cosmos.
Like Paradise Lost, Rocket to the Moon is full of clashing moods, windy flights, people half-real, half-symbolic. At moments the over-intense young girl and the too-sinister old man all but tumble into the whacky farce world of a You Can't Take It With You. The last act wobbles all over the place. This is not miscalculation on Odets' part. It springs from a pretentious-side of him that wants to make every common dentist's office widen out into the universe. Sometimes he mistakes abracadabra for revelation.
Growing Pains. "I was a worker's son," says Odets, "until the age of 12." His father had sold papers, peddled salt; his mother had worked in a factory. During Clifford's childhood the family shuttled back & forth between Philadelphia—where he was born in 1906—and The Bronx, where they settled down. The father slowly rose in the world, ceased to be a worker, today is very well off.
Says Odets: "I was a melancholy kid, I guess." He quit high school at 15 because "it was a waste of time." He took to writing poetry, and his father angrily smashed his typewriter. Indignant, Clifford cried: "You can't harness me to a truck—can't you see I'm not a truck horse?" "Believe me," he says today, "there were some very gloomy evenings."