Ethics versus survival. Taking versus giving. Hitting rock bottom but still clinging onto hope. That's paradise—and what it's like to lose it— in the 1935 mind of playwright Clifford Odets.
"Paradise Lost," as penned by Odets and directed by Chicago's Louis Contey, is a classically depressing yet uplifting chronicle on American utopianism (or the lack thereof).
Replete with a bevy of local character actors—from the furnace repairman to the squirrely mafia friend to the father who plays precisely by the book—the cast, one could question, either materializes into a unit or the actors stand on their own. While to me they consummated a team more than they shone as individuals, there's one underlining concept about the production that you will no doubt relate to your own life: We've all been there.
We've all flirted with the American dream, as Odets did so obsessively—the financial hiccups and the grave matters of morality testing us even as far back as in the Garden of Eden. More than four decades following his death, Odets would want you to lose yourself in "Paradise Lost" and heed these words he spoke in 1963: "Dear American friend. That miserable patch of event, that mélange of nothing while you were looking ahead for something to happen, that was it! That was life! You lived it!"
A master's graduate from DePaul University, Contey comes to this production with experience, after living and breathing Odets four times now. And you can tell. He gets more than just the gist of the man and has felt his sometimes suicidal despair.
Though times are decidedly different today from those gloomy Great Depression days, we still do and always will feel the financial and metaphoric booms and busts of life.
While the concepts of "Paradise Lost" flung me into memorializing my wealthy furrier grandfather, who stashed loot in the walls of his humble abode because he didn't trust the banks, this overall first-rate cast and crew offer a shrill wakeup call about how lucky we are to be living with so much fertility today.
Reviewed by Centerstage!
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