by Lawrence Bommer
Theater Critic,
published August 29, 2007
If everything old is new again (my secret hope), then protest playwright Clifford Odets should come into his own right about now.
Angry advocate for a fair society, he pillories the false idols that a Great Depression inevitably dislodges. We must, he insists, be held to higher values than the gold standard. Witness the Gordons, subject and target of this, reputedly Odets’ favorite work. In Louis Contey’s stunning revival they are survivors who define themselves against adversity, the strong ones turning hard and the stronger ones holding their humanity.
A wake-up call like his “Awake and Sing!” and “Waiting for Lefty,” “Paradise Lost” meticulously tabulates the cost of failure, in dollars and in contagious desperation, on a family who wake up from the American Dream to the true nightmare shared by 16 million unemployed citizens. Like Chekhov, whose melancholia is echoed in almost every scene, each character becomes a play in himself, the spoken dialogue only a small part of his real story.
These include the Gordon parents who find it so hard to stay upright while hurtling downhill, the sons who succumb respectively to illness and the lure of easy money, the family friend who says, “Failure has gone to my head,” the business partner who fleeces his friend, the young mobster who hopes money can buy him a clean conscience and—the play’s conscience—a furnaceman appalled that people are starving in the richest city in the world. Working for the Group Theatre, whose actors he knew so well, Odets handles every character as if they owned the play. Never is his compassion so clear than at the end, when, though everything we’ve seen seems to document despair, Odets shows how much hope hurts and how much more it heals.
Contey’s command of this Depression-era tapestry is as awesome as the author’s. TimeLine, a troupe who can do no theatrical wrong, assembles an ensemble so right for their parts and each other that 1932 is tomorrow. Scott Aiello is a force of nature as the firebrand who most speaks for the author. As the beleaguered patriarch, Michael Kingston offers an electric look at a man fighting to stay decent while forestalling bankruptcy. As his wife, battered by life but not her husband, Janet Ulrich Brooks looks equally weighed down by worry and lifted by love. Though clearly the eternally down-on-his luck father-in-law, Whit Spurgeon’s Gus is as vital and worthy as Cervantes’ Sancho Panza or Mark Twain’s Jim.
It’s tempting to single out their awesome acting but all 14 performers are tributes to Odets’ master vision: As life grinds them down, they rise to the occasion or they fail, equally real in each response.
