Criticism

Doreen Piano

Piano is a Marion Brittain Fellow in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. In this essay, Piano considers how the character Cleo Singer embodies the competing impulses of personal and economic pressure in the play.

Rocket to the Moon is generally understood to mark Clifford Odets's move from explicitly political subject matter, dealing with the social and economic conditions affecting Americans during the Great Depression, towards a drama more interested in interpersonal relationships and, more specifically, the subject of love. While there is undeniable evidence to support this claim, it is arguably overstated. Indeed, while plays such as Rocket to the Moon and Odets's previous play, Golden Boy, certainly focus on the personal rather than the political, a focus on the economic and social conditions that affect the lives of Odets's protagonists is never far beneath the surface. As such, Odets's later plays should be understood to be drawing from the same well and embodying many of the same concerns as his earlier works. Christopher J. Herr, for example, states in his book Clifford Odets and American Political Theatre that, despite the less overtly political nature of these later plays, "the economic imperatives that drive the characters remain strong." A number of critics have suggested that, in the later plays such as Rocket to the Moon, Odets was trying to deal with broader social and economic issues and events in his personal life, such as his divorce from the actress Luise Rainer. Gabriel Miller, for example, suggests that during the late 1930s, as the world was on the verge of World War II, "Odets was torn between the desire to write about the sociopolitical situation and the increasing pressure of his personal troubles."

In Rocket to the Moon, these economic imperatives are paramount, and Odets successfully interweaves the personal motives of his central characters with a nuanced understanding of the effects of the Great Depression and the economic conditions of the 1930s on their desires, needs, and aspirations. These considerations can be seen both in the relationships between Ben Stark, the central protagonist of the play, and his male co-workers, and in the relationship between Stark and Cleo Singer, his secretary. If Rocket to the Moon should indeed be seen as a highly personal play in which the socio-economic conditions of the Great Depression serve as a backdrop to the interpersonal relations that compel its plot, then attention must be paid to the interrelationship between these two drives. Nowhere are these potentially contradictory impulses more apparent than in the character of Cleo Singer.

From the very beginning of the play, issues of economics are highly evident. The play begins with an argument between Stark and his wife, Belle, about Stark's desire to expand his dental practice by moving his offices to a more affluent area of town and to specialize as an orthodontist. For a mixture of personal and financial reasons, Belle does not want Stark to give up the security of his comfortable and moderately successful practice. Much of the remaining action of the play — particularly Stark's affair with Cleo — can be understood to stem from Belle's successful attempt to persuade Stark to remain where he is. Frustrated with his lot in life, Stark embarks on an affair with Cleo because she signifies the possibility of change that Stark has been denied in his professional life. As Gabriel Miller suggests, Cleo "inhabit[s] a world beyond the Depression-decimated experience of the other characters" who live in a "world of loneliness, pain, separation, and exile." While characters such as Frenchy and Cooper symbolize potentially moribund futures for Stark, Cleo offers the possibility of escape. She is, as Prince suggests, the "rocket to the moon" that will free Stark from his quotidian troubles and reinvigorate him. However, Cleo is an ambiguous outlet for Stark's frustrations, both because of the ways in which Stark understands her and because she has her own desires and ambitions.

In as much as Cleo embodies a symbol of escape for Stark, she is repeatedly imagined as an item available for consumption; the interpretation of Cleo as edible, expendable, or consumable is one of the most consistent patterns in the play. Indeed, each of the central male characters likens her to a commodity on at least one occasion. The idea that Cleo is a commodity available for consumption by the play's male characters is expressed almost immediately when, in her first conversation with Prince, Cleo says that she wants to be a dancer and that she has appeared on stage in a number of shows. As Cleo desires to use her own body as a commodity by becoming a dancer, each of the male characters refers to her at some point during the play in relation to food, something to be consumed and discarded. Moments later, Cleo seems to reject the position that her aspiration to be a dancer seems to establish, telling Prince that she does not "have to stand in Macy's window." In this reference to the famous New York department store, Cleo's status in the play as an item of consumption is concretely established for the first time. Despite her assertions to Prince in which she rejects the position as a consumable object, however, Cleo is repeatedly understood to be such by the play's male characters. From the very beginning of the play, Cleo Singer symbolizes the collation of the personal and the economic, and her personal value is equated — often ambiguously — to an economics of consumption in which the inter-personal and the socioeconomic worlds of the play are brought together.

Cleo's youth and vitality stand in marked contrast to the vituperated natures of each of the play's male characters and to the barren nature of Stark's wife, Belle. Stark is undergoing a mid-life crisis, Prince is an old man, Frenchy is incapable of sustaining a romantic relationship, and Cooper has been turned into a shell of a man consumed by failure. Belle cannot bear children, is seen as a drain on Stark's vitality, and has sapped him of his professional aspirations. Cleo, on the other hand, has a "jingling body" and, as Wax tells her, is "fresh and alive." Quoting Shakespeare, Stark tells her that she is "green and fresh in this old world," explicitly contrasting her youth to the aridity of the lives of the men she is surrounded by. Prince calls Cleo a "girl like candy," comparing her youth to a food most commonly associated with children, something sweet but lacking in nutritional value. References such as these that equate Cleo to food and perishable consumables are not the only ways in which Cleo is symbolized as a source of life in the play. Cleo also brings Stark glasses of water from the water cooler and waters the geraniums he is unable to keep alive by himself.

While Cleo stands in contrast to the male characters — young and full of vitality — her youthful charms are also understood to be temporary. As Herr suggests, the association of Cleo with "the natural abundance of fruit" is "ambivalent at best." By associating her youthfulness with fruit, a commodity with a finite shelf life, Odets is revealing the limitation in these virtues as much as he is holding them up as possible routes of escape for men such as Stark and Prince. This, indeed, is the opinion of Cleo's virtues held by Frenchy, who tells her, when he is warning her not to ruin Stark's life, that he "knows the difference between love and pound cake." Cleo's appeal, Frenchy believes, is one that will fade as she ages and the luster of her youthful vitality wears away. Of all the characters in the play, Frenchy is the most hostile to Cleo's presence and speaks of her most often in negative terms. For example, he tells her that he gave her the job as receptionist in "a moment of aberration" because she pushed her "jingling body in [his] face." Later in the play he calls her "Juicy Fruit" and likens her to a spider weaving a web. For Frenchy, then, Cleo's charms should not be trusted. Frenchy sees Cleo as a distraction from the real business of men's lives.

The inherent ambivalence of the imagery associated with Cleo is further complicated by the fact that she stands at the close of the play as the only character who is able to escape the dentist's office. Of the play's central characters, Cleo alone is able to see a life for herself beyond the horizons of Stark's waiting room. "I'm a girl," she tells Stark and Prince at the close of the play, "and I want to be a woman." She has learned that the options presented to her by both Stark and Prince — to wait in vain for Stark to leave his wife or to enter a loveless marriage of convenience with Prince — will take more out of her than she will gain in return. As the focus of the play shifts from Stark to Cleo (as it does in the third act), she rejects the way she has been used by the men and insists that she is more than a commodity to be eaten up and spat out. "No man can take a bite out of me, like an apple and throw it away," she tells Wax after their failed date, and this sentiment applies equally to Stark and Prince. Moreover, this statement echoes the claim she makes to Prince at the beginning of the play that she does not have to "stand in Macy's window."

Source: Doreen Piano, Critical Essay on Rocket to the Moon, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

• 1930s: Most women are expected to be housewives and, if they do choose to work, are limited to jobs as secretaries, assistants, nurses, or teachers.
  Today: Many women hold powerful and important positions in major companies. However, women still earn proportionally less than their male counterparts.
• 1930s: Space travel only exists in the realm of fantasy and there is no federal space agency.
  Today: Since 1961, over four hundred people have visited outer space and NASA is making plans to send astronauts on a mission to Mars.
• 1930s: Three million American workers are members of unions.
  Today: The AFL-CIO alone has over thirteen million members from sixty-one different unions.