People never actually spoke like this, and it’s a crying shame that they didn’t:

SAM: Why should you act this way?
HENNIE: ‘Cause there’s no bones in ice cream. Don’t touch me.
SAM: Please, what’s the matter …
MOE: She don’t like you. Plain as the face on your nose …
SAM: To me, my friend, you talk a foreign language.
MOE: A quarter you’re lousy.

This unmistakable blend of yearning, “so’s your Aunt Fanny” sass, and plain weirdness could only have sprung from the galvanizing voice of Clifford Odets, the other (i.e., not Samuel Beckett) playwright celebrating a centennial this year. The above snippet of dialogue comes from his best-known play, the Depression-era tub-thumper “Awake and Sing!,” which is receiving a somewhat dutiful but heartfelt revival by Lincoln Center Theater.

The boisterous, stifled, indomitable Berger family of “Awake and Sing!” spawned many children: The Jewish experience was essentially a nonentity on Broadway stages until Odets came along, making him the theatrical forefather of not just political writers like Tony Kushner and John Osborne but also Paddy Chayefsky, Neil Simon, and Arthur Miller.

Jake Berger (Ben Gazzara), the eldest family member, may be constantly spinning Caruso records and exhorting anyone within earshot to right the world’s wrongs. But he’s frequently drowned out by Odets’s own glut of plug-nickel bravado and gutter poetry, as the demands of family and of righteousness slam into each other with all the elbow-jutting chaos of an extended family crammed into a walk-up apartment in the Bronx.

It would be wonderful to say that “Awake and Sing!” feels as fresh today as it must have in 1935, when it opened to staggering acclaim at the Belasco Theatre (also the locale of this revival). Alas, it registers today as a vibrant but musty bit of Popular Front agitprop, with its villainous bourgeois uncle and its frequent insistence that “life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills.” Despite a few casting gaffes, however, director Bartlett Sher and his peerless design crew have found their way through all but the play’s hoariest moments and, after nearly two hours of resolutely naturalistic staging, created a visual bit of trickery that demolishes the play’s naturalism but still somehow feels absolutely organic to the text.

Jake’s exhortations to fight the world’s wrongs find a sympathetic ear both in his grandson, the striving Ralph (Pablo Schreiber), and in the embittered Moe Axelrod (Mark Ruffalo), who lost his leg in World War I and who frequents the Bergers’s Bronx apartment to make time with Jake’s other grandchild, Hennie (Lauren Ambrose).The intervening generation has more immediate concerns – or at least Bessie (Zoe Wanamaker) does. Her long-suffering husband, Myron (Jonathan Hadary), has long ago retreated into a genial purgatory of Teddy Roosevelt quotes and picture-show memories, but Bessie’s terrified (and terrifying) determination to keep the family afloat threatens to drive her loved ones away, particularly her two children.

Add a hapless immigrant (Richard Topol) enlisted to make an honest woman of Hennie and that capitalist uncle (Ned Eisenberg), who helps the family out with handouts when he’s not breaking strikes downtown, then throw in a disputed insurance policy and some smoldering sexual tension between Moe and Hennie, and you’ve got a melodrama packed with juicy characters and torn-from-the-breadlines social commentary.

Mr. Sher is perhaps too enamored of that last ingredient: Odets wouldn’t be Odets without his booming, symbolic testaments to the working man and his booming symbolism, but Odets can also be a little too Odets, with the third act including a half-dozen variations on an increasingly belabored theme. Mr. Sher and his cast linger over these variations, many of which would benefit from a brisker, less contemplative pace.

Perhaps it’s this repetitiveness, or maybe it has more to do with his diminished vocal capabilities, but Mr. Gazzara is far more convincing during Jake’s beaten-down moments than during his incendiary battle cries. His performance takes time to develop; ironically, this legend burns brightest after his flame has burned down to embers. A similar trajectory occurs with Mr. Schreiber’s pained Ralph.

The surprising weak link is Ms. Wanamaker’s conniving, stalwart Bessie. Her take on the matriarch bespeaks an intense focus on her outer-borough accent and beaten-down body language rather than on any of her character’s ferocious contradictions. By comparison, Mr. Ruffalo – a legitimate film star tackling a memorable but minor role – excels at both the period detail and the aching passion behind his withering one-liners. (“Cut your throat, sweetheart. Save time.”) Mr. Hadary’s ludicrously touching Myron, Mr. Topol’s abject Sam, and Ms. Ambrose’s cynical Hennie also leave sharp impressions.

Throughout, Mr. Sher establishes an elegiac, plaintive mood bolstered enormously by Christopher Akerlind’s sepia-toned lighting, which gives the Berger household the bleached appearance of a Dorothea Lange photo. At the end of the second act, though, and continuing through with a marvelous final image, he and set designer Michael Yeargan throw the dice with a hugely risky visual effect – having the outside world, with its crushing and ennobling possibilities, intrudes on the Bergers’ lives in all its austere beauty.

The haunting image is slightly reminiscent of one from another Lincoln Center revival, Gerald Gutierrez’s gripping 1995 take on “The Heiress.” In fact, Lincoln Center may have finally found its replacement for Mr. Gutierrez, who showed his proficiency at everything from that to “A Delicate Balance” to “The Most Happy Fella” before dying at the age of 53. Mr. Sher has shown himself capable of bouncing between plays and musicals. He has assembled a design crew in Mr. Yeargan, costume designer Catherine Zuber, and the masterful Mr. Akerlind that cannot currently be matched in visual artistry. Most important, Mr. Sher knows what to do with new works and what not to do with old ones.

“Awake and Sing!” may not be his most airtight production, but it is a punchy, rambunctious, altogether creditable reintroduction to a sadly neglected giant of the theater. Odets, not heard on Broadway in more than a decade (not counting his posthumous “donations” to the “Sweet Smell of Success” musical), has been asleep for too long. Mr. Sher and Lincoln Center deserve our thanks for waking him up and letting him once again share his convoluted, demotic, peculiar, necessary song.

Until June 11 (111 W. 44th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, 212-239-6200).