1939 - 1949
 

The play was performed in the Elizabeth Peabody Playhouse
357 Charles Street, Boston, Mass.

"Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust." (Isaiah 26:19)

Writer: Cliff Odet

Myron Berger: the father of the family
Bessie Berger: his wife
Hennie Berger: their daughter, age 26
Ralph Berger: their son, age 22: Leonard Nimoy
Uncle Morty: Bessie's brother, a successful businessman: Henry Eckman
Jacob: father of Bessie and Morty; a Marxist; he lives with the Bergers
Moe Axelrod: a friend of the family who eventually boards with the Bergers: Boris Segal
Sam Feinschreiber: an immigrant who courts Hennie
Schlosser: the janitor in the Bergers' apartment building
Cameraman (Walk-on): Ken Rosenfield

The play is set in The Bronx in 1933; it concerns the impoverished Berger family and their conflicts as the parents scheme to manipulate their children's relationships to their own ends, while their children strive for their own dreams.
 

Act I
Bessie Berger, the spirited but kindly matriarch in a poor Jewish family, tries to break her son Ralph's love for a poor orphan. Her father urges Ralph: "Go out and fight so life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills." Ralph's sister, Hennie, is in love with Moe Axelrod, an embittered war cripple. She becomes pregnant. Now her mother makes her marry a meek suitor, a recent immigrant who is hypersensitive but, Bessie thinks, is bound to make "a good living".
 

Act II A year later Ralph and Hennie are more depressed than ever. When Bessie learns that Hennie tells her husband about the real father of her baby and Ralph blames her for his sister's unhappyness, she smashes her father's records in a moment of despair. Now old Jacob, her father, commits suicide, but not before giving Ralph a chance in life: He shall be his hair to have a chance in life.

Act III: Ralph remembers his grandfather's exhortations to "do" and to "act", to "Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust.", and Hennie is persuaded to desert her family and elope with Moe Axelrod. Ralph makes his decision: "My days won't be for nothing, let Mom have the dough. I'm twenty-two and kicking, I'll get along. Did Jake die for us to fight about nickles?" Determined to give up his selfish love and become a radical agitator for a new society, Ralph feels reborn: "I'm one week old! I want the whole city to hear it, fresh blood, arms. We got'em. We're glad we're living."
 

S.: "Interviews - American Archive of Television"

Now, you said earlier when you were 17,would you like to talk about that?
Leonard Nimoy:
There was a director who came into the neighborhood, his name was Boris Segal. ... Boris was a Harward Law student at the time and he had worked out a deal with the Elisabeth Peabody House that I mentioned earlier where they gave him one of the guest rooms to live in and he could take his meals there and in return he directed some plays. ...  He did a

Checkov play and something else, a J.B. Preesly play. Then someone said he's casting a play called Awake and Sing and he's looking for somebody like you they said, a teenager, to play the role of the son of the family. So, I went met him, did some reading with him, got the role and became inflamed with the idea of becoming an actor. This was my first time doing an adult play. All the stuff I had done previously was children's theatre. I got very, very turned on to the idea of doing this kind of work for the rest of my life.