When Harold Clurman came to direct "Paradise Lost" in 1935 he thought the characters "mad." They still are.
In the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's new production of Clifford Odets' drama about the decline of a middle-class family in the Great Depression, the dithering of Leo Gordon (Michael J. Hume), the idealistic businessman whose handbag factory is failing, cannot help but remind us of the maddening Madame Ranevskaya in "The Cherry Orchard."
Leo is a kind man who reads Emerson and means well, but he is clueless. Neither Gus (Richard Elmore), the Gordons' family friend, nor any of the family's three adult children has more than the flimsiest grasp on reality. Leo's partner, Sam Katz (Tony DeBruno), is a tragic figure making relentlessly bad decisions and spreading unhappiness.
Not only are the characters a bit mad, the world they inhabit is charged, off-kilter, slightly unreal. Characters keep startling us with their passions. Kewpie (Mark Bedard), a childhood pal of Ben Gordon (David DeSantos), enters and promptly hits on Ben's new wife, Libby (Sarah Rutan), then hits Ben with his fists. The mysterious Pike (Mark Murphey), a denizen of the basement, where he cares for the Gordons' furnace, launches into a full-blown rave-up about the betrayal of the American Dream at the drop of a clinker.
The effect of all this is unbalancing, as if we somehow keep dropping into the middle of a scene with no backstory. Just what are these people on about?
This ambitious, richly textured production, directed by former long-time OSF Artistic Director Libby Appel and featuring some of the OSF's finest actors, struggles mightily to impose some kind of order on Odets' mad, sprawling (two dozen characters), plotless paean to the middle-class blues, 1930s-style.
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