A rapier in one hand, a soapbox in the other, young Clifford Odets of “Awake and Sing” fame who is rapidly developing into the Cyrano de Bergerac of the cult of playwrights-with-a-message, has got Broadway by the ears again.
This time he has done it with “Waiting for Lefty,” a one-act play in inumerable episodes that had been knocking around Broadway’s hinterland stages waiting for the author to get a reputation before it was tossed at the big-time customers.
When Odets finally achieved importance with his pungent “Awake and Sing,” the Group Theatre decided the time was ripe for the author’s step-child to step in and take a bow. Evidently fearing that, despite the extremely low scale of prices in effect at the Longacre Theatre, a one-act play by Odets, “Till the Day I Die,” was tossed in to give the public its money’s worth.
This observer is of the opinion that the added extra attraction, as it were, wasn’t at all necessary. “Waiting for Lefty” is enough entertainment for any evening and for almost any price. “Till the Day I Die,” even though it is an anti-Nazi play and should for that reason if for no other command a major share of attention, is so much gilding the lily.
Informal as a street-corner crap game and every bit as rowdy in repartee and vernacular, this “Waiting for Lefty,” a play based on last year’s turbulent taxi strike in New York City, has everything the most exacting playgoer could ask of a playwright and a group of inspired actors.
It tells the stirring story of a nondescript class of New Yorkers, hackmen, who have been kicked from pillar to post so long that they have finally reached the breaking point. They’ve got a union, but the members have been cowed by a set of traitorous officers whose sole aim it is to keep them from striking. The entire play is built around a meeting at which the question of to strike or not to strike is to be thrashed out.
The audience is part of the meeting. Officers of the union address the audience. They try to talk the hackmen out of striking. They wheedle, they cajole, they threaten, they bulldoze, they bring up on the platform crooked cabbies and thugs to emphasize their arguments. They are heckled by the membership. The membership demands that each of the committee be given a chance to talk. There are cries of ‘Where’s Lefty?’ Lefty, you are given to understand, is the leader of the radical wing which is demanding a strike.
“Lefty’s a red,” the president of the union, Fatt roars at the membership. He’s not here because he’s yellow, Fatt flatly charges. “Red and yellow,” Fatty sarcastically comments, “gives you a dirty color.”
While waiting for Lefty, the committee is given a chance to have its say. They say it in a series of flash-back black-out scenes.
When they’re done, one of the cabbies comes dashing down the aisle with news of Lefty. He’s been found behind the car-barns with a bullet-hole in his head. Lefty never shows up. Lefty doesn’t have to show up. The strike he wanted wins out in a stirring, throbbing scene. And though, he never appears, the character of Lefty has been one of the best-limned characters of the entire play.
Heightening the interest in this invigorating bit of theatre, is the personal appearance of the author in the role of Dr. Benjamin, a member of the committee, a young doctor turned cabbie because he had been turned out of a hospital job. He had been discharged simply because he was Jewish. Odets in this play reveals himself as almost as good an actor as he is a playwright.
While the play is distinctly of the propaganda type, that doesn’t seem to matter. Although these days, the Shakespearean theorem of “all the world’s a stage” might well take the corollary that “all the stage is a soap-box,” in this particular case nobody gives a hoot. It’s the most exciting piece of soap-boxing that’s hit Broadway in ever so long and that street could easily digest more of it.
As for the curtain-raiser, “Till the Day I Die,” built around the cruelties of the Nazi secret police in rooting out and crushing the underground activities of the Communists in Germany, it is a bit too gruesome to be palatable. Superbly acted as it is, and packed with action as it is, it remains an interesting item but an item which one doesn’t like to take home to mull on. From one point of view it is useful. It does effectively dramatize a portion of German life today that cannot be given too much publicity. —H. W.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
