Auditions for Awake and Sing! at Elmwood Playhouse

Odets's turbulent comedy-drama
about a Jewish family struggling to stay afloat in the  eternal war between idealism and
responsibility. The story about a struggling Jewish family in the Bronx of the
mid-1930s, the Bergers, is ever youthful in its depiction of hope abutting
despair, dreams fading in the light of reality, and parents battling their
growing children. So timeless are these subjects, and so forcefully does Odets
present them, that Awake and Sing! still has the power to move and
surprise.

Character
Breakdown

(visit  www.elmwoodplayhouse.com/auditions for full
descriptions)

BESSIE BERGER,
mother,  loves life, likes to laugh, has
high energy & is a shrewd judge.

MYRON, her husband, a
born follower but not sad or depressed with a dignified sense of himself.
Heartbroken without being aware of it.

HENNIE a girl who has had
few friends, male or female. She is proud. She won’t ask favors. She travels
alone,  self-reliant in the best sense.

RALPH a boy with a clean
spirit. He wants to know & learn. ardent, romantic, sensitive and naive.

JACOB, an old Jew trying
to find a right path for himself and others. Aware of justice, dignity and an
observer of the others. Reflective, a sentimental idealist,  with the flair of an artist.

UNCLE MORTY successful
American business man, a rich relative to the BERGER family. The lives
of others seldom touch him deeply; pleased by attention, shrewd judge of
material values. Tickle him, he laughs

MOE AXELROD,  Proud, mordant, bitter, fights against his
own sensitivity. Lost a leg in the war. Likes people, has strong but contained
emotional mechanism.

SAM FEINSCHREIBER,  A lonely man, a foreigner in a strange
land, hypersensitive, conditioned by the humiliation of not making his way
alone. Might have been a poet in another time and place.

SCHLOSSER, the janitor,
an overworked German whose wife ran away with another man and left him with a
young daughter who ran away and joined a burlesque show. Suffers rheumatic
pains. Lost his identity twenty years before.