Waiting For Lefty

Waiting for Lefty is a one-act play by Clifford Odets. It initially premiered in January 1935, performed by the Group Theatre, a company started in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasburg with the goal of revolutionizing American theater as a means for social change. Lefty was Odets’s first produced play, written in response to a call by the New Theatre League for a piece to perform in union halls or meeting spaces. The first production was a benefit performance for New Theatre magazine, previously known as Workers Theatre magazine, a short-lived publication put forth by the Communist Party. Written at the height of the Great Depression in the United States, Waiting for Lefty was a part of the Workers’ Theatre Movement, a series of leftist theater companies all over the world that dramatized the plight of the working class in plays with pro-communist leanings. The first performance played for an audience of 1,400 enthusiastic, pro-worker, pro-union spectators. Immersed within the setting of a union meeting, the audience excitedly participated in the performance, returning a character’s communist salute in the final scene, and joining in with the cries of “STRIKE, STRIKE, STRIKE!!!” (31) that ended the play.

Waiting for Lefty became an instant success with critics and audiences. It was produced all over the country, and in March of the same year, it opened on Broadway paired with Till the Day I Die, another Odets play, with the funding of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a Depression-era relief organization that was part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. The FTP was an employment initiative that produced theater around the country to provide jobs for out-of-work theater professionals and to offer free (or nearly free) theater to the public. Later that year, Lefty was restaged on Broadway as a standalone play.  It is frequently epitomized as an example of agitprop theater, a term derived from words “agitation” and “propaganda” to describe a genre of art designed to rile up audiences into acting toward social change. The play requires no set and places the audience into the role of underpaid, overworked taxi drivers attending a union meeting and making the decision to strike for better wages and working conditions. By breaking the fourth wall, it involves the audience in the meeting, encouraging them to be active rather than passive—an encouragement that they are urged to continue when they leave the theater.

Odets’s play was inspired by the New York City taxi strike of 1934. While New Yorkers still patronized taxis during the Great Depression, low employment rates made for too many drivers with too few options for alternative jobs. Taxi drivers became desperate, as the owners of the fleets began to extort more and more from their wages in the forms of leasing fees and increasingly high commissions on fares. Cab drivers not only went on strike, but retaliated against those who scabbed, breaking windows, ripping doors off cabs, tossing patrons from vehicles, and even setting taxis on fire. When Waiting for Lefty premiered, the riots would have been a fresh memory for New York audiences.

In the 1930s, Odets wrote several more leftist plays, including Awake and Sing! (1935), Till the Day I Die (1935), and Golden Boy (1937). But while pro-communist sentiment spread throughout the tribulations of the Great Depression, World War II and the Cold War ushered in an era of anti-communist propaganda and fear. Worker’s unions were seen as part of the burgeoning Red Scare and deemed communist organizations. Like many artists, Odets was called to testify before Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, although unlike some others, Odets did not name names and was not blacklisted. Odets insisted that he had been motivated by a deep sympathy for American workers rather than influenced by the Communist Party.

Plot Summary

The play opens at a meeting for a taxi drivers’ union. Union leader Harry Fatt is trying to convince the drivers not to strike. A gunman watches the members warily, ready to act on Fatt’s command. Fatt accuses dissenting workers of being communists. One worker asks about the whereabouts of Lefty, their elected chairman. Fatt insists that he has no idea. Joe Mitchell stands to speak, objecting to being called a communist when he is a patriot who fought in World War I. The scene shifts and flashes back to Joe and his wife Edna at home. Edna is tired of living in poverty and being unable to feed their children. She threatens to leave Joe and convinces him to organize his fellow workers and strike. Joe leaves, excited to find Lefty and start working. The play shifts into the next scene, a vignette about a driver named Fayette. Fayette is offered large amounts of money to work in a lab with a famous chemist, but he will have to help him make poison gas as well as spy on the chemist and report on his progress. Fayette refuses to sell out his principles. The following scene is about a young woman named Florence who is deeply in love with a cab driver named Sid. They’re engaged, but end the relationship because Sid can’t afford to support a family and isn’t sure that he will ever be paid enough to marry her.

The action returns to the meeting, where Fatt introduces Tom Clayton as someone who has experienced strikes and can attest to their ineffectiveness. As Clayton speaks to the men and tries to dissuade them from striking, a voice speaks out from the audience. The voice reveals that Clayton is really named Clancy. He is hired by companies to sow discord and break up unions, which the man in the audience knows because Clancy is his brother. The next scene shifts into depicting the man in the audience’s memory. He is a surgeon, Dr. Benjamin, and he sees how class inequities kill people in the hospital. When Dr. Benjamin is fired for being Jewish, he vows to get a job—possibly as a taxi driver—and join the cause of the workers. Returning to the meeting, an older driver named Agate speaks to the crowd and urges them strike. Fatt’s goons try to grab him, but he evades them, telling the drivers to fight for themselves, that they can’t wait for Lefty when Lefty might not show up. Suddenly, a man comes through the audience. He informs everyone that Lefty has been found dead, murdered with a shot to the head. The workers began to chant, “STRIKE, STRIKE, STRIKE!!!” (31)