THEATRE
CHRONICLE
AT THIS DATE,
I doubt if Mr. Clifford Odets needs to
be introduced. In case he does require an introduction,
how-
ever, allow me to state that he is the young man who is
always described as "the white hope" of the American drama.
Opinion on him is divided. Some critics contend that he will
write the great American drama. Others challenge this con-
tention and retort that he has already written it. Naturally,
Mr. Odets is more modest than some of his admirers. In
his many letters to the press he has merely referred to his
latest play,
Paradise Lost,
as his most mature play to date.
The criticism of a play by Clifford Odets is, at this date,
an extremely difficult task. To begin with, one must decide
with whom he his to be compared. He has already been com-
pared with Chekhov. And in the introduction to
Three Plays
by Clifford Odets, Mr. Harold Clurman,
director of the
Odets plays, demurs, insisting that O'Casey is a more apt
comparison. Heywood Brqun, in writing of
Paradise Lost,
declares that Odets is greater than O'Neill ever has been
or eve~ will be. Robert Forsythe, in the
New Masses,
writes
that the faults in Odets are as inconsequential
as are the
faults in Tolstoy,
Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Wolfe.
Some time ago in a newspaper column there was a note an-
nouncing a series of lectures by a college professor on the
subject to
The DraTlUl from Aristophanes to Clifford Odets.
And in his man~ letters to the newspapers, explaining his
plays, Mr. Odets invariably seems to talk of himself, Ibsen,
Chekhov and Sean O'Casey. Also, in a public speech Mr.
Odets proved that Shakespeare,
Bach, Beethoven,
Wait
Whitman and Goethe were all propagandists,
and that he
"himself was a propagandist;
and he was hence able to draw
the conclusion that he was in good company. I might, of
course, compare Mr. Odets with Strindberg,
but frankly
I do not think that that would be an appropriate compari-
son, and I really do not think that there is a resemblance be-
tween Clifford Odets and Strindberg.
Since, then, there is no one else with whom I might com-
pare Mr. Odets, I shall have to fall back on a comparison
of Mr. Odets with himself. Odets rose to his present public
position very quickly, and on the strength of three plays,
Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing
and
Till the Da,y I Die.
Waiting for Lefty
was an alive, exciting, even electrifying
one-act, agit-prop play, which revealed a genuinely capable
young playwright who possessed a vigorous talent for dia-
logue, and some capacity for characterization.
Awake and
Sing
was a competent, moving and extremely well done, well
cast, ani! well presented play of Bronx family life. Its first
two acts were more satisfactory than the last one, because
in the last act we were shown a tendency toward speech
making which has become even more noticeable in his "latest
play. Withal it was a sound play, and again revealed a talent
for dialogue and characterization.
Till the Day I Die,
which
was based on notes from Billinger's
Fatherland,
was trans-
muted into an adolescent nightmare.
In
Paradise Lost,
Mr. Odets sets out to write both a
28
play and a treatise on civilization. The theme of the play is
the death of the middle class and the creation of a new
world. It establishes a kind of structure of events whereby
the past of the middle class was a paradise, the present is
a time of stress and. crisis and the future will be another
paradise. On its face this is a structure of events which must
be repugnant
to Marxists,
revolutionaries,
materialists.
It
implicitly counterposes two utopias, one past and one future.
Dialectics, in the Marxian sense, exists only as a kind of
hiatus in ·the present.
The characters in
Paradise Lost
are all presented both as
human beings in their own right and as symbols. I am not
certain of many of the symbolical meanings of the characters.
If the reader must know the symbolical meanings, he may find
some of them in the author's letters to the press. The scene of
the play is laid in a large and ugly home, where two families
live, the Gordons and the Katzes-both families supported
from the" pocketbook factory that is run by the partnership
of Katz and Gordon.
Katz is a hard-boiled and realistic
business man who cuts wages and finally ruins the business
by stealing the funds. He is also impotent, this being a sym-
bolical suggestion of the nature of the middle class. Mrs.
Katz is some kind of a moron who follows Katz around the
stage, picking up his coat. Gordon senior is supposedly the
middle class of liberal tendency. He spends three acts length-
ening his face, wondering what life means and never know-
ing what time it is, to use the vernacular.
His wife is a
bourgeois mama who is always trying to tell papa what time
it is. There are three children. One is a boy dying from
sleeping sickness, who has previously been a bank clerk. He
wanders around the stage for three acts, muttering sym-
bolically about the stock market in order to prove the death
of the middle class, and it is very difficult to tell just what
he means. At all events; sleeping sickness is here another of
Mr. Odets's symbols. The second son is a champion Olympic
runner who can no longer run because of a bad heart. He
marries in the first act, sells rubber dolls in the second
while a gangster is cuckolding him off-stage and then he is
shot in a stick-up. The third is a girl who is a very fine
pianist and who cannot secure work. Her boy friend is a
violinist, and neither can he get a job. He goes to Chicago in
Act One, and never returns. The girl plays a piano, wanders
meaninglessly around the stage, and at one point shrilly cries
that she is not sex-starved. Then there is family friend, Gus
Michaels, who is the kind of a person that we call an idiot.
There are other characters who wander around the stage,
corning into and out of the play for some reason or other
and to be some kind of a symbol. There are two hoboes who
symbolize the working class in p~tches and tatters. There
is a broken-down furnace man who is always happening in
and out to expostulate. In the play he seems to be the author's
walking delegate. There is a taxi-driver turned gangster, who
is the stock type of stage and movie and exists merely as a
string of gags. There are one or two more, and they pop in,
pop out, and everybody is moving around. In Act Three the
Gordons are being evicted, and a high point of pathos is
reached. Gus Michaels has collected stamps all his life. He
sells his stamp collection for two hundred and fifty dollars,
and this is tragic; and he offers the money to the Gordons.
FEBRUARY,
1936
