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Theater review by Raven Snook
Rating: ★★★ (mildly recommended)
Ticketing: Buy tickets here
Some things never change. In 1935, the Group Theatre’s Waiting for Lefty, a one-act play about NYC taxi drivers arguing about whether to strike, premiered at the Civic Repertory Theatre on West 14th Street and turned its 28-year-old playwright, Clifford Odets, into an overnight sensation. More than 90 years later, it is being revived just a few blocks away—at Classic Stage Company, near the serendipitously named Union Square—in a production that begins with the sharing of flyers with pertinent facts about our present age of oligarchs ("We have now seen the planet's first trillionaire"). If Waiting for Lefty’s fervent call to arms on behalf of workers blares too loudly for modern ears, its themes of inequality and labor exploitation resonate still.
A protest song by the cast of ten catapults us back to a bare-bones union hall in the Great Depression, where union boss Harry Fatt (Greg Hildreth) urges the hacks to stay on the job. A series of vivid vignettes depict the cabbies’ backstories and the obstacles they face: poverty, corruption, disinformation, nepotism, prejudice, fear of being labeled a red. Overflowing with Odets's period proletariat poetry, these quick scenes are stuffed with juicy tidbits that flesh out archetypes like the fed-up wife (a prickly Tala Ashe) who needles her hubby to strike: "Everything was gonna be so ducky! A cottage by the waterfall, roses in Picardy. You're a four-star bust! If you think I'm standing for it much longer, you're crazy as a bedbug."
Waiting for Lefty was a 40-minute agitprop smash in its time, but its bluntness and brevity have made it a less natural candidate for revival than Odets's subtler full-length works; an acclaimed production of Golden Boy just closed in London, and the immigrant family drama Awake and Sing! is returning to Broadway next month. In a savvy move that expands the play's running time along with its entertainment factor, Steven Pasquale—a celebrated theater actor making his directorial debut—fills out the production with songs performed by the cast, which features the husband-and-wife folk duo Yeller Tooth (Sahar Milani and Cameron Scoggins). A few are original, but most are Appalachian-inflected arrangements of standards and activist anthems like "Bread and Roses” and "Which Side Are You On?” Susan Misner's choreography aptly captures repetitive blue-collar weariness.
Standout songs include the plaintive beggar’s ballad “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” and an impoverished couple's final dance to "If I Didn't Care,” gorgeously sung by Adam Kantor. But as effective as these are, it is telling that most of this revival’s most rousing moments are musical ones. Odets’s fervent final scene wants to make you leap from your seat to a picket line, but while Pasquale's affection for the play is evident, the revival never quite rises from a lovingly realized piece of theater history into the galvanizing experience it's meant to be. In the end, it leaves you waiting.
Waiting for Lefty. Classic Stage Company (Off Broadway). By Clifford Odets. Directed by Steven Pasquale. With Greg Hildreth, Tala Ashe, Raffi Barsoumian, Adam Kantor, Sahar Milani, Cameron Scoggins, Austin Durant, Doireann Mac Mahon, Zach McNally, Henry Stram. Running time: 1hr 10mins. No intermission.
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