Paradise Lost Program: On Clifford Odets

“Clifford Odets taught me a great deal about identity, because his characters are so vividly examined and understood and loved by their creator-intensely realized…. His characters unfold before you as if you were watching an onion peeled away layer by layer. And all around him, you suddenly see that there are still other layers (home, country, family, society) that have also outfitted him and layers that must either be shed or used as protection from the onslaughts that life inevitably and without mercy presents to us.” – Tennessee Williams as quoted in “America’s Fervent Playwright” by Marian Seldes, Lincoln Center Theater Review, Issue 42, Spring 2006

“Odets’s work…is profoundly of the lower middle class with all its vacillation, dual allegiance, fears, groping, self-distrust, dejection, spurts of energy, hosannas, vows of conversion, and prayers of release.” – Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years

“He tried to clarify the meaning of life right to the end, and that’s the meaning of his life and death. He was a wild man and a noble man.”
– Marlon Brando as quoted in Clifford Odets: An American Playwright by Margaret Brenman-Gibson

“I’d like to write a really good play sometime. Like O’Neill, Odets, Chekhov, something the way it really is, capture the action of the way things really go on.” – David Mamet as quoted in “Mamet’s Plays Shed Masculinity Myth” by C. Gerald Fraser, New York Times, July 5, 1976

“The Group Theatre has produced the finest revolutionary playwright in America.” – Luther Adler, referring to Clifford Odets in The Fervent Years by Harold Clurman

Rachel Hutt is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.