Paradise Lost is not a great play, as the Group thinks it is. But it is without doubt an important play because in material and method it marks the fresh, swift advance of a young dramatist who not only thinks and feels deeply but whose writing talents are essentially and in an unusual degree theatre talents: the power to state a situation in terms of its most dramatic elements, to observe and define character, to write active dialogue, to conquer attention.

Paradise Lost, so far as one can interpret Mr. Odets through the play and through what he has said about it in print, aims to be the story of the disintegration of the middle-class liberals in America under the capitalist system, and their hope of redemption through a new social system. This is almost exactly the theme of Awake and Sing, except that in the earlier play Mr. Odets chose a family in the Bronx as his protagonist, and tried to prove his thesis from his type. In Paradise Lost he has broadened his canvas 'to find a theatrical form with which to express the mass as hero'. (pp. 94-5)

It is good, in these cowardly days when old men are afraid to think freely, to see a young man boldly hitting out for a new paradise, convinced not only that he knows what is wrong and why, but that he can, quite surely, put us all on the real right road out of a world's unrighteousness that tortures him. 'Take it from me,' he seems to say; and whether you take it or not, you must be impressed by his earnestness and his ideals.

Such a subjective method applied to playwriting has, of course, its obvious penalties. As you watch the play, you find the playwright himself recurrently, and insistently, showing through his characters, and pretty soon you find yourself judging not the play, but the playwright, saying to yourself, 'This boy thinks the Bronx is the world'. He is not only cock-sure, but naively inexperienced. Someone should tell him that [his characters],… while they may be American citizens, are not in any sense representative of the middle-class, nor is there anything in their thinking or acting to indicate that they are liberal. They are the dregs of the social system, money-loving, money-starved capitalists who have gone rotten through spinelessness and the frustration of their own golden longings. No revolution would help them. They are too old—every one of them, but especially the young ones.

All of this only means that Mr. Odets has not made you accept either his first premise or his conclusion. But between the two there still stands a play of more than usual power, observation, tension. (pp. 95-6)

The special quality in Odets' playwriting … that is the most developed facet of his talent is related to his own acting experience—although it is by no means accounted for by that alone. His plays are made to the measure of his actors; there is nothing he demands of them, no characterization, no action, no conflict, that is beyond the reach of a fairly competent player. He knows how and why and when actors should speak, when the emphasis should be on the character who is speaking, on the immediate situation, on the play's theme. (p. 96)

Odets' speech, moreover, when it is not affected, or perhaps it is more generous to say when it is not affected by his desire to try the higher flights of poetry, almost speaks itself, it is so exactly and seems to instinctively right for the stage—even if it is not always rightly adjusted to the individual character. Half of the strength of Waiting for Lefty was the strength of speech, clear, simple, expressive, every word doing its work singly and as a part of a phrase, a speech, a scene. In Paradise Lost Odets has carried both of these marked talents—the talent for the word and for writing an actors' play—far ahead of what he did in Awake and Sing. (p. 97)