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)
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