Productions & Events featuring Clifford Odets

Reportedly considered by Odets himself to be his best and most significant work,Paradise Lost is an intense family drama set amid the vast landscape of social and economic challenges faced during the Great Depression. How will financial misfortune affect the values, personalities, relationships and aspirations of the well-educated, middle-class Gordons and their close circle of friends?

Odets’ passionate characters speak with a fast-talking language that sings with big dreams and optimism for the future, despite daunting odds.

Clifford Odets’ masterpiece is as robust, emotional and gritty as the Great Depression itself. As Odets describes it, each of the characters share a fundamental activity — a struggle for life amidst petty conditions. Crowded together in a cramped Bronx tenement and laid low by the Great Depression, this moving portrait of a Jewish family is both funny and heartbreaking as they cope with survival and cling to dreams of a brighter future.