Waiting for Lefty
Consisting of a series of related vignettes, the entire play is framed by a meeting of cab drivers who are planning a labor strike.
The company was founded as a training ground for actors, and also to support new plays, especially those that expressed the social and political climate of the day.
In the second vignette, set a week before that union meeting, Joe comes home to find that his furniture, not yet paid for, was repossessed.
He is upset that his brother, a college boy, has swallowed the "money men's" propaganda and joined the navy to fight foreigners who are, ultimately, just like himself.
Back at the union meeting, Fatt brings up Tom Clayton, who took part in an unsuccessful strike in Philadelphia.
The younger Dr. Benjamin enters, upset that he has been replaced for surgery on a patient in the charity ward by an incompetent doctor named Leeds, the nephew of a senator.
"[4] The historic strike was led by Samuel Orner,[5] after he was fired for failing to make enough money for the cab company on a particular night shift.
In the 1934 strike, Orner was found drugged and unconscious on the night of the union meeting,[6] but he was roused and taken there before the vote was called.
[1] During the political attacks on communism and artists of the left in the 1950s in the United States, Odets distanced himself from having used the 1934 strike.
In his 1950s testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee, Odets denied that he had based his play on that strike or been to a union meeting of cab drivers.
"[4] According to literary historian Christopher Herr, rather than trying to create a historical account, Odets used the strike as a symbol to attack what he saw as the larger issue: that in the middle of the Great Depression, the capitalist structures of the time had remained unaltered.
The characters often directly address the audience, in an effort to break the fourth wall and incite the viewer to action.
[1]: 315 The audience was greatly moved and met the play with acclaim; the cast that night took 28 curtain calls.
[3] It moved to the Belasco Theater in September of that year for 24 performances in repertoire with Odets's play Awake and Sing!, where its cast included Luther Adler.
[10] Following the initial run, hundreds of theatre groups requested the rights to perform the piece.
Its simple staging allowed it to become an affordable and popular production for union halls and small theatres across the country.
Such was Odets' fame that his next play to be produced, Awake and Sing!, was billed as a piece "by the author of Waiting for Lefty ".
[citation needed] Harold Clurman said of the performance: The first scene of [Waiting for] Lefty had not played two minutes when a shock of delighted recognition struck the audience like a tidal wave.
[1]Only one Broadway reviewer was present at the premiere: Henry Senber, second-string drama critic for The Morning Telegraph.
"[15]While the energy of the performance greatly stimulated the audience, theater critics reacted less positively to the archetypal characters and the play's socialist leanings.
Joseph Wood Krutch wrote: The villains are mere caricatures and even the very human heroes occasionally freeze into stained-glass attitudes, as, for example, a certain lady secretary in one of the flashbacks does when she suddenly stops in her tracks to pay tribute to "The Communist Manifesto" and to urge its perusal upon all and sundry.
