The American Repertory Theater’s spring festival, America: Boom, Bust and Baseball, presented it’s second offering at the Loeb Drama Center this week.  Falling under the label “Bust”, Clifford Odet’s Paradise Lost is a pithy tale of loss in the wake of the Great Depression which has some startling, and at times disturbing similarities to our current economic climate.

I’m used to the A.R.T. offering cutting edge, rapturous opuses, going just a little bit farther than other playhouses in Boston to give the audience something more, but this production of Paradise Lost, directed by Daniel Fish,  gave 3.5 long hours of dull dialog and confusing, shaky staging.  It was hard to really focus on any one character or story because it felt like the author just dumped a bucket of story lines on the floor and left the director to try to piece it together lyrically in a way that makes sense, and that keeps the audience engaged.

Fifteen minutes into an extremely dense and nonsensical opening act, both of the people sitting to my right were fast asleep.  They left after the first of two intermissions, along with about six other people around me.  I can’t really say that I blamed them- I could barely keep my eyes open myself.  I’m glad that I stuck it out though, because while the first act did drag considerably, the actors did help to liven up the story in the second and third acts, just barely keeping my attention.

There just wasn’t anything going on in the piece that I cared about.  The characters were underdeveloped and there were far too many to keep track of, though they all seemed to live in the same house even though that fact was unclear and didn’t ever get around to being explained.  As the story unraveled and we collected more tidbits about the characters and how they are related, I was less engaged and more annoyed that I had invested my mind into characters that I didn’t care about, respect, or understand.  On the heels of the spectacularly character driven Gatz, Paradise Lost was especially disappointing.

Despite my obvious criticism of the play choice, and the lack of what I consider to be a firm directorial standpoint, the actors and actresses worked their hardest to give their character’s life, some succeeding better than others.  I enjoyed the sharp tongue and good timing of Michael Rudko in his portrayal of Mr. Pike the furnace man, and T. Ryder Smith was very good as both the demonic Mr. May and younger son Julie (though it was sort of difficult for me to buy that he was the younger brother, he looks like he’s about twice the age of Hale Appleman who played his older brother, Ben).  Ryder had the great instincts of a veteran performer which made him extremely interesting to watch, even after the character’s personal tragedies limited his range of motion in the third act.  Sally Wingert also had some very nice moments as Clara, family matriarch.  In fact, she best embodied the physical and emotional characteristics of the time period.

Another thing that I found both puzzling and ultimately distracting, was the choice to include modern clothing and technology into the show.  While I understand that the audience was meant to see the parallel between the late 1930’s and today, I think we could have figured it out on our own without the Casio keyboard, the POD storage unit,  and the Enron t-shirt.

I wanted a lot more from Paradise Lost than I got.  The show did live up to its claim that it was a “bust”, though unfortunately I do not think it was in the way it was intended to.

Interesting projections made us see the cast in a different light- literally.