Stripped to the bone, Rocket to the Moon is a triangle play; the story of a kindly, thin-blooded, tired dentist … who has accepted life at prevailing odds, surrendered to routine, "gone to sleep." His bitter nagging wife and his sinister, mocking father-in-law … appreciate his goodness, yet cannot help taunting him. From a romantic young girl … in his office who is fighting to live, do, go somewhere, and who loves him, he gets sympathy. Suddenly he finds himself in love with her. But when the showdown comes, he stays with his wife: not only because of conscience or past ties, but because he is too weary to wrench himself out of the old life and cope with the high-powered demands of the new.

Odets does not encase this eternal situation in the snug, tight frame of the well-made Broadway "domestic drama." Heaving, racked, volcanic, the play belches the hot...