CHICAGO -- On April 17 I Sing the Blues, a supposedly "lost" play by Clifford Odets, will make its stage debut in a DePaul University student production at the Victory Gardens Theatre. The 1933 rarity was uncovered by Odets scholar Peter Hobert whose Internet search finally led to a Box 57 in the Billy Rose Collection at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts of the New York Public Library. An early draft of Odets' Group Theatre masterwork Awake and Sing, the play is much more pessimistic: In this version -- which both Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg found too dark to produce -- the grandfather's death is definitely a suicide and the two lovers are forever separated.
-- By Lawrence Bommer
Chicago Correspondent