The Noah story with its striking dramatic possibilities has challenged playwrights from the Middle Ages to the present. In our own country, it made a notable appearance as an American Negro folk drama, but until Clifford Odets’s recent play, The flowering Peach, it was never set in Jewish idiom. Gerald Weales looks at Odets’s drama, both in the context of his previous work and as an image of Jewish life.

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It probably wasn’t the forty days and forty nights of rain on the Ark roof that seemed long to Noah and his family; it must have been the hundred and fifty days that it took for the waters to go down. Wet or dry, however, neither period could have dragged more noticeably than the two hours and a little more that were needed to act out Clifford Odets’s The Flowering Peach (a play which lasted rather less long than the flood waters took to recede). It would not be unusual to report that Odets had written a very bad play, for he has written bad plays before, but it is sad that his version of the Noah legend should be so very dull. The Flowering Peach managed—perhaps because of its title (Odets has a knack for tides—Awake and Sing, Rocket to the Moon), perhaps because of its subject—to stir up greater than average expectations. That may be why Brooks Atkinson, floundering in the Sunday Times to convince himself that he liked the play, hit upon the preposterous phrase “unspoken poetry” to characterize two of the scenes. Unspoken poetry, maybe; unwritten poetry, certainly. Yet the play did not really need poetry; it needed genuineness, grace, and purpose.

It was Odets’s apparent decision to make of the Biblical story a modern Jewish folk play, to turn Noah and his Esther into neighbors, at least in spirit and intonation, of Myron and Bessie Berger. The pattern of Noah’s family is that of many lower-middle-class Jewish families in New York. The old folks, who speak with a Yiddish accent, hold close the tradition of the family, they demand of the sons and their wives, who are Americanized (i.e., modernized) in speech and thought, a loyalty that cannot easily be given. This contrast was made particularly obvious in the production at the Belasco Theater because Noah and his wife were played by Menasha Skulnik and Berta Gersten, veterans of the Yiddish theater, and the children by actors and actresses whose experience has come from Broadway and English-language off-Broadway work.

It is, then, to such an environment that Odets tries to wed the Noah legend. He fails for two reasons. First, his setting sounds surprisingly phony, even to an outsider; second, there is a good chance that Noah could not fit into such a setting even if it were presented with authenticity. All of the familiar devices for the stage recognition of Jewish family life are in the play: there is the mixture of practical wisdom and semi-philosophic foolishness, which in this case should be inspiration, in Noah and his wife; there are the loud, pointless arguments; there is the emphasis on getting ahead; there are the recurrent references to food. The desultory chatter that weaves in and out of these identification marks is written and read in the inverted singsong that characterizes and caricatures English-Yiddish speech, but Odets vulgarizes the whole process. “Molly” Berg in her endless radio, television, and stage chronicle of The Goldbergs has set a pattern which, for all the soap-opera surroundings, has the warmth and humor that Odets is lacking; even Theodore Reeves in his pleasant little play Wedding Breakfast has come closer to the speech that should fall naturally to the second generation, to Noah’s sons. As often as not Odets sounds as though he is writing an extended dialect joke, a friendly one of course. There are occasional funny lines, but for the most part the cheapness goes beyond the rhythm of the speech and takes in the content as well. Perhaps the most obvious example is the scene involving a tax collector, a character who is also representative of the present-day gimmicks that are used for laughs. Shem, the successful businessman son, has sold his lands and hoarded the money, forgetting that there will be no place to spend it after the flood. When the tax collector appears, Japheth has to knock Shem down before Noah can get the keys to turn over to the government man. As the latter goes off stage, the reviving Shem begins to mutter. When Noah asks, “What did he say?” somebody answers, “He says, ‘Get a receipt.‘”

It may be that Awake and Sing was no more authentic, that it was, in fact, consciously arty in its transmutation of a family in the Bronx to a family on the stage. Yet the vigor of the language and the relevance of the setting to the theme gave the play a reality that The Flowering Peach cannot hope to duplicate. Odets may well have gone to life for his material this time, hoping to turn it to some poetic use, but it seems plain, as the lines come across the footlights, that his source is Yiddish comedy, which is as broad as it is limited. We know from the elements of Yiddish comedy that find their way into English-language entertainment, from the comedians who, like Skulnik, have made the jump from Second Avenue to Broadway, and from the younger ones who have trained on the borsht circuit, that the jokes deal mainly and broadly with a small community of interests. Minerva Pius’s Mrs. Nussbaum used to be funny because Fred Allen was blithely pushing this kind of thing as far as it would go (and besides he is a genius at puns), but to dress Noah up in such surroundings is rather on a level with the Mae West radio skit on the Garden of Eden which generated so much anger about fifteen years ago. Menasha Skulnik must share with the author the destruction of the character of Noah; the actor, when his material is fitted to his style, may be as irresistible as Wolcott Gibbs finds him, but it was easy enough to resist him When he turned Noah into a maudlin, foolish little man addicted to a number of vaudeville mannerisms. Berta Gersten’s style was a little less flamboyant; the flat, solid delivery of her lines made many of them seem funnier than they were, but the same flatness and solidity operated when she was supposedly playing for pathos, so in the end her Esther became a kind of monumental one-note.

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Even if Odets had avoided the falseness that he almost seems to have worked for, and even had he managed to bring to The Flowering Peach the vitality of Awake and Sing, it is doubtful that the Noah legend could have become a modern Jewish folk play. It is not that Noah is too weak to stand a transmutation. He has successfully become a healthy French peasant at the hands of André Obey and he has been reborn as a Southern American Negro, by Marc Connelly out of Roark Bradford. In both of these versions, however, Noah has a more valid relation to his surroundings than he does to the timeless Bronx in which Odets has placed him. Obey’s Noah is in a tradition as old as medieval painting and mystery plays in which Biblical characters always became peasants of the artist’s country, and is also part of a tendency in modern French literature to translate figures of Biblical and Greek legend into characters that are both peculiarly French and universal. It is also apparent that The Green Pastures has its roots in a genuine American Negro life.

But the story of Noah, even though it is a Jewish legend, seems to have little relation to the only two possible forms for a modern Jewish folk play. Neither Odets nor Noah could be comfortable in the European Yiddish folk tradition represented by Sholom Aleichem and Y. L. Peretz, a tiny bit of which has been Englished onto the American stage in Arnold Perl’s The World of Sholom Aleichem (reviewed in COMMENTARY, April 1954). This kind of writing is inevitably marked by the situation of the European Jews out of whom it grew; it is tinged with the deprecating laughter of survival that is sometimes called “ghetto humor.” Odets, as an American Jew, could not write this kind of literature and Noah, as a pre-Diaspora patriarch, could not fit comfortably into it. Any new tradition would have to lie where Odets, in his earlier plays, vaguely sees it, in the communities with a Jewish population dense enough to allow its members to retain a group personality even while they absorb everything that is more widely American.

Yiddish theater itself, the theater that gave Menasha Skulnik to The Flowering Peach, indicates the assimilation of the American Jew. It does not produce Biblical or even ghetto drama. It produces an endless series of musical comedies with lamentable titles, plays like Riverside Drive, in which Maurice Schwartz has been appearing this year, or, more significantly, the Yiddish hit of a few years ago, Death of a Salesman. But, of course, most Jews do not even go to the Yiddish theater. Instead they see the same Broadway shows, go to the same movies, or stay home to watch the same television programs that attract everyone else. Noah, then, is obviously not a candidate for folk hero in the mixed culture of the American Jews. Of course, in the strictest definition of folk art, the growth from within the people themselves, the plays of André Obey and Marc Connelly have no more claim to the designation than does The Flowering Peach, but since these playwrights were working within traditions and Odets was trying to fabricate one, their work has a genuineness which his does not.

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One might, at least, have supposed that Odets undertook his attempt at folk arc because he had something important that he hoped to say in this new guise. The Flowering Peach does not offer even that consolation. Just as the play cuts Noah down in stature, it reduces God to a series of lighting effects by Abe Feder, almost a variation on an offensive old joke: turn on the blue lights, the man wants a blue miracle. This is perhaps understandable because Odets is ordinarily more interested in men than he is in God. Yet the message of the play, if it has a message, is one that we have had from Odets before. When, shortly before the final curtain, Noah cocks his head and looks inquiringly toward the Lord, he comes up only with the news that the Flood was God’s last bit of interference, that from now on the earth is in the hands of men. What Noah is actually telling us to do is to awake and sing—individually, not collectively this time—but, still to awake and sing. There is also the idea that Japheth spells out heavily, before he and his wife go off to repopulate the world, the new truth that he and Noah and all the brothers have learned on the voyage, that no man is always right, and that humility is more useful as a social weapon than self-righteousness. Even this idea is not totally new to Odets, for Dr. Stark has a glimmer of this truth at the end of Rocket to the Moon. The trouble with Odets’s ideas, however, does not lie in the fact that he has said them before; they seem pointless here largely because they have no dramatic validity. Japheth says that everyone has changed on the voyage, but there has been no evidence of the changes on stage, except that Noah does let two of the sons swap wives, which he certainly would not have done at the beginning of the play. Noah’s last conference with God is even more plainly outside the action of the play.

There were a few imaginative touches, one of which was the mouselike animal that Odets invented, which sang to indicate the presence of God. Another was his depiction of Ham. In the Biblical story Ham and his descendants are consigned to be forever servants because he looked upon his father’s nakedness when Noah was drunk. In the play Ham’s own predilection for liquor at any price and his lack of interest in anything beyond the immediate possibilities give an interesting twist to the sentence from Genesis; Shem makes the connection quite clear by shouting in a moment of anger that Ham will always work for him, for he will always have something that Ham needs. But because Odets has nothing very new or very exciting to say and because he chooses to cheapen the vessel that carries his old wine, The Flowering Peach is an extremely disappointing play. Because, this time at least, he has written badly and at some length, The Flowering Peach is a very tiresome play.

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