Paradise Lost

For those who love the plays of Cliff Odets, writer William Gibson has some disheartening news. Regarding the plays Odets penned in the 1930s for the Group Theater—which were written specifically to be performed by the likes of company members including Elia Kazan, Stella Adler, John Garfield, etc.—Gibson’s assessment is: You had to be there. “Not in my theater-going since,” Gibson wrote introducing  Odets’s published journal, “have I seen such a fusion of writing and performance, and you that are young shall never see so much.”

Well, crap, then. One can go on the defensive and argue that good actors are good actors regardless of the era. But anybody who saw Amy Morton and Rondi Reed in August: Osage County (penned by Steppenwolf’s Tracy Letts for the actors in his company) or Guy Massey and Colm O’Reilly’s cult-fave work as George W. and Jim Lehrer in The Strangerer (penned by Theater Oobleck’s Mickle Maher for his company brethren) knows the fusion Gibson is writing about.

Odets’s hard-boiled 1935 play about what the dramatist believed to be the decaying of the American middle-class is now in a production that’s relatively soft-boiled. Examining a New York family in danger of losing its garment business due to the patriarch’s naive management, Paradise Lost was written during the playwright’s most zealous period. An obsessive advocate of the common man, Odets somewhat irrationally believed that the coarsest of laborers went about their thankless business speaking in the highest imaginable poetry. It can only be assumed this is what made the Group’s actors so uniquely matched to his work. They could convincingly look like Cagney and talk like Keats.

Though the cast of Contey’s revival works awfully hard to convince us that the chips are down, the converse irony is that the moxie often feels fabricated and self-aware. As the dreams get dashed and the kids get sicker and the family piano gets sold, Contey’s actors appear to be fiercely performing the year 1935 rather than living in it.

There are exceptions, of course. Every time soot-covered factory worker Scott Aiello enters to recite another oratorio about workplace injustice we think, This is the time he’s going to sound plain ridiculous. Miraculously, he never does. And Brian McCartney, as the family’s embezzling business partner, is a piping-hot smoke stack whose crimson-faced bluster never sacrifices his credibility.

And then there’s Janet Brooks, giving one of the year’s most fully realized performances, even as the production sags around her. Brooks is a unique kind of pragmatic anti-matriarch. Small and sturdy-framed, she always plays her characters with horse sense and a marksman’s intuition. Yet instead of making them less feminine, these qualities  make them more womanly. With Brooks at its  center, this doomed family still somehow has a glint of hope.

Emerging from the throes of the Great Depression, Paradise Lost, in its greatest passages, is a kind of articulate primal scream. While TimeLine’s production has deep respect and admiration for the moment that produced the play and the artists who toiled to create it, it never howls quite as loud.—Christopher Piatt