About the Play:

Golden Boy has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Male Monologues, and Female/Male Scenes.

Golden Boy is a full-length drama by Clifford Odets. The story of a young man of working-class immigrant stock who defies his family and gives up a promising career as a classical musician for a chance at immortality in the boxing ring. Golden Boy is a blistering and powerful look at fame and fortune corrupted, and the seductive promise of the American dream. Especially recommended for school and contest use.

Golden Boy charts the swift rise of a gifted twenty-one-year-old violinist, Joe Bonaparte, who is corrupted by fame and fortune when he chooses to become a prize fighter. People are inclined to laugh at Joe, a moody young Italian with "cockeyed" notions. At heart a musician – he has a real talent for the violin – he longs to be "top man" in some other field. So he goes into the prizefighting racket and becomes surprisingly good at it. In each fight he becomes more and more brutish and finally in a big match he kills his opponent. With both hands broken and his spirit crushed, money and fame mean nothing to him. Not even Lorna, the girl who once gave him courage to face defeat, can lift him out of his despair. Driving madly through the night to forget everything, Joe and Lorna are killed.

Golden Boy premiered in 1937 at the Belasco Theatre on Broadway in a celebrated Group Theatre production directed by Harold Clurman and was revived on Broadway in 1952 and had its third revival on Broadway in 2012 where it received eight Tony Award nominations, including Best Revival of a Play, and three Drama Desk Award nominations, including Outstanding Revival of a Play. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in repertory, high school, college, and community theatre productions. This acting edition contains notes showing how nearly all scene changes may be made with a minimum of effort.

Fun Fact: For his audition at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio, where the acceptance rate was about one out of two hundred, Steve McQueen, aka the "King of Cool," put together a monologue from Clifford Odet's Golden Boy.

Cast: 2 female, 17 male

What people say:

"A play quick with life, pungent in dialogue and characterization, stirring and comic." — Sun

"Golden Boy is grand and glorious theater." — Backstage

"Golden Boy is a true and telling parable of American ambition, a tale in which the ordinary is made extraordinary ... It is Mr. Odets's language, here as always, that makes the dramatic contrivances of Golden Boy not merely plausible but irresistible. Better than any other American playwright, he understood how to take the coarse immigrant patter of the streets of New York and hone it like an uncut diamond that longs for the chisel." — Wall Street Journal

About the Playwright:

Clifford Odets (1906-1963) was an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor. Known primarily as one of the great American playwrights, he also wrote or co-wrote 18 movies for film and television. He came from an Eastern European, Jewish immigrant background. Raised in New York City, he became one of the original acting members of the prestigious The Group Theater, which was committed to producing realistic, contemporary American plays for American audiences and it achieved the goal – 20 new American scripts produced in the Group's 10-year existence.