*Playwright's Corner- Clifford Odets' "Waiting For Lefty"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the American playwright Clifford Odets.

Book/Play Review

Waiting For Lefty, and other plays, Clifford Odets, Random House, New York, 1935

There has always been a place for didactic political plays, like the one under review here, “Waiting For Lefty”, within the left-wing movement. Such plays have value both as a means to express certain plebeian cultural values that are not expressed through mainstream bourgeois cultural institutions and for purely propaganda purposes to get the “message” out to the sometimes illiterate, sometimes just barely literate, or sometimes merely recalcitrant masses. These are both honorable and acceptable means in order to create an “alternative” cultural expression looking forward to the new culture of the new communist society.

Moreover, there has been no lack of those cultural workers, including playwrights and actors, who, while not plebes themselves, have readily come over to our side, at least for a while. This movement toward the plebes is episodic but takes a big leap forward especially in times of general social turmoil like the period of the Great Depression in the 1930’s and in the social movements of the 1960s. That is the case with the playwright under review, Clifford Odets, and the cultural organization that initially sponsored his works, The Theater Guild of New York, in the 1930s.

Put a collectivist spirit in the air as a result of serious class struggles for union recognition in some a massive strike wave in 1934, a turn by the Communist International toward the popular front and alliance with previously ignored or despised bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements, some hunger actors and related cultural workers, AND the bright lights of New York and you have the Theater Guild. Its illustrious personal included many young performers who would go on to, if not honorable theater careers, then long ones like Lee J. Cobb and Elia Kazan who made appearances in Clifford Odets works.

As to “Waiting For Lefty” it certainly is a period piece of those times. The subject, a pending strike of taxi cab workers, and how various characters came to class consciousness, or at least of consciousness of the need to struggle against the bosses is pretty straight forward. Except, that the Lefty of the title, a known militant worker from whom his fellows had previously taken their political lead is no where to be found. Or rather is, in the end, found dead, in some back alley from a boss’s thug’s bullet. Lefty may have been the catalyst for action, for developing political awareness, but the plebes are on their own now. The class struggle continues. Definitely, as intended, an uplift kind of play that could use a revival today. If not of the play itself then of the need for class struggle theme behind it.

Note: I would be remiss if I did not mention that Clifford Odets, and a number of other members of the Theater Guild troupe, most infamously Elia Kazan and Lee J. Cobb, when the sunny days of the 1930s struggles passed and the hard Cold War days of the “red scare” came in the 1950s had no problem naming names of those whom they were asked to identify as communists or, more probably, fellow travelers by various Washington committees. Were they, like some of the characters in Odets’ “Till The Die I Die” (also in this book), tortured by some Gestapo-like fiends into submission for that information? Or were they threatened with some other more psychological abuse and being merely mortal could not stand the heat. No, they “sang” just to keep their jobs. Others like Dalton Trumbo, the Hollywood Ten and Howard Fast, brought their toothbrushes with them to the committees and took the jail time instead. While there was (and is) a huge gap between the politics of these Stalinists and ours we honor them despite their politics. For Odets, Kazan and Cobbs we have nothing but scorn.