Waiting for Lefty. A play in one act by Clifford Odets. New York premiere: Longacre Theatre, 26 March 1935. Scenic design: Alexander Chertoff; produced by The Group Theatre, Inc.; directed by Sanford Meisner and Clifford Odets. Performed on a double-bill with Odets’ Till the Day I Die. With Abner Biberman, Russell Collins, Lee J. Cobb, Elia Kazan, Ruth Nelson, Clifford Odets and others. Closed July 1935 (144 performances; an additional 24 performances were produced at the Belasco Theatre in September 1935 in repertory with Awake and Sing). Text: Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays, New York: Grove Press, 1993. Includes introduction by Harold Clurman and preface by Clifford Odets.

In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was well into his first term as President, and he was not yet “Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” The Depression had ignited considerable leftist (and rightist) political activity, an activity reflected in the popular culture as well, and the end of the Depression was still far in the future. Gregory LaCava’s very strange 1933 film Gabriel Over the White House suggested that the activist FDR administration might lead to a fascist dictatorship — a not necessarily unwelcome development, the film implied.[1] The films of the Warner Bros. studios, along with a successful line of gangster pictures, included social-realist depictions of working class life as well, including They Drive by Night (Humphrey Bogart and George Raft as interstate truckers) and the 1932 Taxi!, with James Cagney and Loretta Young, in which Cagney tried to organize independent cab drivers into a union (and in which the Irish Cagney spoke Yiddish).

The New York taxicab industry is also at the center of Clifford Odets’ early Broadway play, Waiting for Lefty, produced in 1935. Set in a taxi union committee meeting room, the union leadership and the drivers themselves argue whether or not to call a strike. Six short free-standing scenes, performed by the drivers, demonstrate several instances of social injustice, some relating to the condition of the taxi drivers and others not (a chemist is asked by an industrialist to work on a poison gas project; an internist is fired from his job at a hospital when it is discovered that he is Jewish). The more activist members of the drivers union finally convince the rest of the drivers to strike for fairer wages, undermining the authority of the union leaders, themselves backed by guns and violent thugs.

Although ostensibly about a taxi drivers’ strike, the play through its  Brechtian free-standing episodes argues for job actions in protest of the injustices exhibited by the owners, the union leadership and the government. As the union leadership paints the more extreme activists as “red boys,” a speaker says, “I ain’t a red boy one bit! Here I’m carryin’ a shrapnel that big I picked up in the war. And maybe I don’t know it when it rains! Don’t tell me red! You know what we are? The black and blue boys!” (6-7) But this ambivalence towards Socialism and Communism is not maintained throughout the play; a doctor caught in the mechanisms of the American health care system says, “I wanted to go to Russia. Last week I was thinking about it — the wonderful opportunity to do good work in their socialized medicine –” (28)

Interestingly, conformity in the status quo is also an indication of the lack of masculinity among the men of the play. In the first vignette, Joe’s wife taunts him with a variety of insults — “Who’s the man in the family, you or me?” (9) — and threatens to leave him for another man (11).

Though each of the vignettes displays one form or another of social injustice, the victims themselves inevitably decide to fight the injustice. Joe decides to “look up Lefty Costello,” another driver who had apparently been organizing a strike; the chemist punches the industrialist in the mouth (13); the internist decides to “study and work and learn my place” (29) — while earning his living as a taxi driver. And the play itself ends with the union membership triumphantly overruling its leadership. As a character named Agate Keller (played by Elia Kazan in the Broadway production) proclaims:

Hear it, boys, hear it? Hell, listen to me! Coast to coast! HELLO AMERICA! WE’RE STORMBIRDS OF THE WORKING-CLASS. WORKERS OF THE WORLD … OUR BONES AND BLOOD! And when we die they’ll know what we did to make a new world! Christ, cut us up to little pieces. We’ll die for what is right! put fruit trees where our ashes are! (To audience): Well, what’s the answer?
ALL: STRIKE!
AGATE: LOUDER!
ALL: STRIKE!
AGATE and OTHERS on Stage: AGAIN!
ALL: STRIKE, STRIKE, STRIKE!!! (Curtain) (31)

A similar revolution is called for in Till the Day I Die, a longer one-act play with which Waiting for Lefty was originally paired. The first American anti-Nazi drama, Till the Day I Die is set in Berlin in 1935, as an underground organization plots to overthrow the Nazi government; like the characters in Waiting for Lefty, they are tempted with various forms of collaboration; like those characters, they also decide to act decisively rather than accept the status quo. (Contemporary theatregoers would also hear echoes of Waiting for Lefty‘s condemnation of anti-Semitism in the dialogue of Till the Day I Die, drawing a subtle but explicit parallel between the cultures of Depression America and Nazi Germany.)

The romantic faith in social change through revolution is passionate in both plays, and as early examples of American agit-prop political theatre they display extraordinary anger. The dialogue is drawn from street language rather than the high-flown rhetoric of Robert Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois or Maxwell Anderson’s more self-consciously poetic dialogue, and there is a seeming interest in revising the form of social realism from Ibsenite representation to Brechtian “alienation” — three years before Our Town, the audience is presented at the start of the play with “a bare stage.” (5)

But the interest is only seeming. Odets would abandon this formal experimentation with his future plays, turning back to Ibsenite representation; Odets would grow to resemble Shaw, not Chekhov as critic Saul Maloff suggested, in his belief that the social realist stage could be exploited as an explicit avenue towards social change. One is caught up here in the question of the efficacy of the stage in provoking this revolutionary change, and Waiting for Lefty suggests that it is the form of theatrical performance itself, especially in its American flavor, that may render Waiting for Lefty and other agit-prop plays ultimately poor substitutes for social action. Although Waiting for Lefty ends with “STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE!”, it also ends only to be repeated again, night after night after night, the cultural form of theatre dependent on repeated performance. The emotional energies cathected in the performance and reception of the play, exemplified through collective appreciation in the form of applause, directs those energies that may be invested towards social change towards self-approval instead. Although the fictitious taxi drivers may be ready to take to the streets at 8.45, the performers and the audience are aware that the curtain will come down and that the very same play will end in the very same way the next day: always on the verge of action, always with the dream of good intentions, but somehow stuck in neutral, the theatrical form containing within itself the seeds of its failure to serve as an instrument of social change.

Is the play still effective? Perhaps it depends on how you define that word “effective”; its passion can stir the emotions, which is indeed an effect. The play is still revived on occasion, recently in a New Orleans storefront in 2007 (two years after Hurricane Katrina) by the Cripple Creek Theatre Co., from which the below YouTube video of excerpts is drawn.

1. Regrettably, this eccentric film is not available on DVD. [↩]