Intiman's Paradise Lost Relights Odets' Flaming Sword

Clifford Odets always makes me think of the opening of the Coen Bros.' Barton Fink, John Turturro listening offstage to impassioned lines like:

Not this time, Lil! I'm awake now, awake for the first time in years. Uncle Dave said it: Daylight is a dream if you've lived with your eyes closed. Well my eyes are open now! I see that choir, and I know they're dressed in rags! But we're part of that choir, both of us--yeah, and you, Maury, and Uncle Dave too!"

And then comes the call of the fishmongers.

It's an affectionate shot to the ribs, but what you learn watching Intiman's Paradise Lost (through April 25, tickets here) is that Odets was--as any great playwright is--overflowing with voices, not just firebrands urging revolutionary singalongs. Yes, he was also a bubbling fountain of what Arthur Miller called "unashamed word-joy" but a good deal of the joy (and words) came from what he heard around him. How people speak in Paradise Lost is often how they spoke--"Have a piece of fruit," "Do yourself a personal favor," "We're like that for each other"--with no adornment; it's in the soliloquies (arias, really) that the language takes wing and the words sing.

Dramatically, not much separates Paradise Lost from a Chekhov play. An upper middle-class family, the Gordons, is coasting slowly to the end of their charmed, aristocratic life, unable to adapt to the social upheaval all around them. As the play begins, in 1933, the cracks produced by the Depression are just starting to show in the solid walls of their home. (That's my metaphor--the set by Tom Buderwitz actually features a trompe l'oeil scrim of brick and siding that, with L.B. Morse's lighting, exposes a disturbing insubstantiality to the Gordon home.)

And just as in a Chekhov play, as leisurely nostalgia, wry comedy, and love triangles give way to more desperate straits, there's no lifeboat for this particular family. Leo Gordon (Michael Mantell), the mild-mannered, "artistic" father (he designs pocketbooks), makes a mantra of "What is to be done?" reciting it helplessly as hard truths emerge.

Odets deploys the Gordon's family life so masterfully that it's uncomfortable--at the very first line of the play, you're eavesdropping on a phone call between daughter Pearl (Erin Bennett) and her boyfriend Felix (Nathan Patrick Agin). At another point, ex-Olympian runner, unemployed son Ben (Shawn Law) apologizes to guests for airing their disagreements before them, and it's a little like that for the audience. You just met these people and already they've forgotten you're there and are immersed in their familial alliances and grievances.

Director Dámaso Rodriguez has what I count as 23 roles to oversee, with 14 actors. Not all the  characters get much stage time, but most make a distinct impression: the tough-as-nails Libby Michaels (Elise Karolina Hunt), ready to hitch her wagon to Ben or whomever looks like a good bet; her sad-sack, cocooned-in-the-past father Gus (Matt Gottlieb); Leo's blustering business partner Sam Katz, a self-described "ox of a man" gored by greed and his wife's infertility; Democratic ward-heeler Phil Foley (Seán G. Griffin), an intemperate drinker and extoller of the benefits of grapefruit juice; even Mr. May (Brandon Whitehead), a wonderfully circumlocuitous Hungarian firebug.

There's only one radical, really--Mr. Pike, the furnace man (a mountainous Herschel Sparber), radicalized by both unemployment and the First World War. Sparber is so tall, bulky, and craggy, it's hard not to take him as a neo-Realist icon for the working man. Even so, while his worker's utopia cant begins with "16 million unemployed" and starving in the richest city in the world, it is grounded in personal loss, the compulsion to speak his heart.

But maybe I shouldn't overlook Pearl and her foreclosed future, which leaves her bitter and fiercely self-interested--shades of the "Some days I'm very Randian" quote from local Tea Partier Keli Carender. She's not her mother's daughter. Clara Gordon (the splendid Lori Larsen, the closest Seattle has to a Streep) will offer hungry drop-ins food until the end of time. She's the most far-sighted of the Gordon clan, and Odets later said it made him cry to think of her "wearied overpatience," of seeing in advance all she loves stripped away.

Paradise Lost has been criticized for its grimness, its length (two and half hours), and its bursting-at-the-seams cast. I won't lie: the first act feels longer than it is as Odets introduces you to character after character, most of whom have something to say about a few things that have been troubling them. But where it is compelling is in its evocation of the Depression era through the words of people who don't know how it turns out--the dragging-on economic reversal we're now intimately familiar with.

Where the play is great is its sense of family. We may associate him with "workers' unite" sloganeering, but the reality is that Odets knew that our most dramatic moments in life are glimpsed through family. Have been, will be. There may be allegory to youngest son Julie (Eric Pargac), the brainiac stock-picker, coming down with "sleeping sickness," but the Method to how the family responds to chronic illness has a great deal to do, I suspect, with an Odets' sibling developing polio. The innovation of Paradise Lost is that Odets has a wider idea of family in mind, all the people who "become" family (for better or worse).

Rodriguez' direction emphasizes Odets' empathy with the lot of humanity--and it's this understanding of "heart" that makes the work, that gives context for Leo's this-side-of-fatalist optimism (However bad things are, he argues, they can't go on this way forever) and the lesson he learns, near the end, about money and taking care of his family. Odets may want to stand with a flaming dialectical sword, shooing the Gordons out of their classist Eden, but as with many people who have failed at suicide, the healing and hope of human connection is what fired him up.

"Heartbreak and terror are not the heritage of mankind!" Leo exclaims, facing eviction. "The world is beautiful." He's not come completely unglued--it's a statement of faith, of social obligation. In the years following the Depression, as the country quilted together a more durable social safety net, that beauty was more evident than when Odets, himself a believer, wrote. That's something we--when facing people both economically and socially feral--could take to heart, too.