Paradise Lost Program: Revolutionary Force by Whitney Eggers

“We are living in a time when new art works should shoot bullets,” wrote Clifford Odets. As a member of the young generation of the 1930’s, Odets felt a profound anger toward the economic and spiritual torpor of the Great Depression, and an inner fire that burned for revolution. “I believe in the vast potentialities of mankind,” he once wrote to critic John Mason Brown. “But I see everywhere a wide disparity between what they can be and what they are. This is what I want to say in writing. I want to say the genius of the human race is mongrelized, I want to find out how mankind can be helped out of the animal kingdom into the clear sweet air.” Odets’s fervor spills out in the seething, passionate language of his early writing, from his most famous works, Waiting for Leftyand Awake and Sing!to his favorite piece, Paradise Lost.

Before joining the Group Theatre in 1931, Odets struggled for years as a stock actor. Constantly tottering on the edge of starvation, he developed an acute affinity with the poor and the disenfranchised, and felt drawn toward the seedier, more impoverished hangouts of New York City. Harold Clurman, co-founder of the Group, wrote, “Odets seemed to share a peculiar sense of gloomy fatality, one might almost say an appetite for the broken and rundown, together with a bursting love for the beauty immanent in people, a burning belief in the day when this beauty would actually shape the external world.” As this love and belief fought for creative expression, it ignited a passion in Odets to respond to the crisis swallowing his generation-a passion that this country first witnessed in 1935 with his explosive play Waiting for Lefty.

In this one-act about a taxi cab strike, Odets gave dramatic structure to the lives of the ordinary American struggling for survival, making heroes of the lower classes and giving voice to their daily battles: “My God, Joe,” says Edna, “the world is supposed to be for all of us.” Lefty catapulted Odets onto the national scene, and was quickly joined by Till the Day I Die, one of the first anti-Nazi plays in the American theater, and Awake and Sing!, a play about a lower middle-class family enmeshed in what one character calls “a struggle for life amidst petty conditions,” fighting “so life won’t be printed on dollar bills.” In December of 1935, Odets presented Paradise Lost, his fourth Broadway premiere of that year. This unheard-of accomplishment made him a household name, landing him on the cover of Time magazine. With his picture captioned, “Down with the general fraud!” the feature praised his “rich, compassionate, angry feeling for people, his tremendous dramatic punch, his dialogue, bracing as ozone,” saying, “[i]n every Odets play, regardless of its theme…at least once or twice during the evening every spectator feels that a fire hose has been turned on his body, that a fist has connected with his chin.”

For Paradise Lost, Odets drew upon his childhood as a son of first-generation Eastern European immigrants. “Almost all of that play,” he said, “came out of my experiences as a boy in the Bronx. I saw people evicted, I saw block parties, I knew a girl who stayed at the piano all day, a boy who drowned, boys who went bad and got in trouble with the police. As a matter of fact, two of the boys I graduated with ended up in the electric chair and another boy became a labor racketeer. Not too much of that play was invented; it was felt, remembered, celebrated.” Odets shaped his own experience into the members of the Gordon household who, like so many Americans, yearn to match their reality to their dreams, but cannot answer Leo Gordon’s looming question, “What is to be done?”

Initially, Odets found his own answer in the ideals of communism. Surrounded by the detritus of the economic collapse and the powerlessness of the individual, Odets saw hope and redemption in the community of man promised by Marxism. As one who felt himself on the fringes of society, “he wanted comradeship,” Harold Clurman reported. “He wanted to belong to the largest possible group of humble, struggling men prepared to make a great common effort to build a better world. Without this, life for him would be lonely and hopeless.” In October of 1934, Odets became a member of the Communist Party, writing later that “in a capitalist society, criminals, artists and revolutionists are brothers under the skin. For related reasons they are all men of opposition.” His membership, however, would last only eight months before he began to feel pressure to toe the party line in his writing, a creative stricture he would feel again in various ways in the Group Theatre and in Hollywood, leading him to write in a journal entry, “Taming you, they are all busy taming you! Tame the wild beast, the primitive, the savage!” Nevertheless, his commitment to radical change never wavered, and as critic John Gassner wrote, “No one gave himself to radical thought stemming from Marxist dialectics as wholeheartedly in the theater as did Odets, just as no one succeeded in investing cold theory with so much palpitating and tormented flesh.”

For Clifford Odets, the connection between performance and audience, art and reality, was intensely personal, always geared toward the desire to be useful. Toward the end of his life, Odets confessed, “Always I am very thankful that I am an artist, that I write about life, that I reach people with what I write…. For myself a life is useless unless there is a ‘what for’ not connected with the self and self-interests. I would be a very sick and unhappy man if I were not a writer. Nothing else can satisfy this hunger to be useful, to be used for a common good.” Odets’s passion helped shape the American artistic landscape, giving it unprecedented purpose. “The function of an artist in any medium,” he said, “should be to tell the truth completely, from top to bottom. Truth is a revolutionary force.”

Whitney Eggers is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.