A rowdy meeting of a cab drivers’ union membership about whether to strike provides the throughline for Waiting for Lefty. Interspersed are quick scenes that illustrate working class New Yorkers oppressed by capitalist overlords. A family loses its furniture. Sweethearts can’t afford to marry. A bright intern loses a hospital job because he is a Jew. Meanwhile those restless cabbies keep on waiting for Lefty Costello, leader of the rank and file, who is delayed for some unknown reason.
First staged in early 1935, Waiting for Lefty is a one-act work that won sudden fame both for author Clifford Odets and the Group Theatre. Done well, this agitprop classic succeeds as an animated WPA mural, but Classic Stage Company’s revival does the play no favors. An actor making his debut as a director, Steven Pasquale stretches a 45-minute drama into a show nearly twice as long by adding some questionable musical interludes and, worst of all, an unnecessary sequence revealing in slo-mo choreography what happens to Lefty.
Other than inserting Lefty’s silent figure amid the characters, the play has not been revised. Instead, the director incorporates into the text a number of 1930s tunes such as “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” songs of protest like “Which Side Are You On?” and fresh music created by Yeller Tooth, a collaboration between Sahar Milani and Cameron Scoggins, who perform with guitar, banjo, and other company members. Yeller Tooth’s songs, like a few of the protest anthems, are rendered in a twanging country-western style that scarcely reflects the story’s urban location and people.
[Read Roma Torre’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Rather than enhancing the work, these nice musical episodes repeatedly disconnect the play’s should-be rising dramatic action and diminish its impact. Choreographer Susan Misner contributes stylized movement involving swaying bodies and outstretched arms, as well as quite an artistic depiction of aggravated assault upon poor Lefty.
Making good use of the theater’s thrust stage, scenic designer Scott Adam Davis lays out a worn-down wooden floor and hangs above it dozens of milk glass industrial lamps to evoke the Great Depression era. Grubby clothes designed by Márion Talán de la Rosa, like some of the musical selections, suggest the coal fields of Kentucky far more than the Grand Concourse of the Bronx. Mextly Couzin’s mellow lighting tends to prettify the scenes. Perhaps the incongruities in tone, visuals, and music are intended to link more closely the terrible times of yesteryear with tough times of today.
Performances among the 10-member company are all right. Greg Hildreth registers the sweating desperation of a corrupt union boss trying to defuse the crowd with Red-baiting and hired thugs. Henry Stram quietly and precisely depicts contrasting figures of authority. Others are competent if scarcely so authentic; at least their singing is enjoyable. However, Waiting for Lefty is a short brute of a drama demanding vital acting and staging to rouse an audience to go out and strike for a better world: “Stand up like men and fight for the crying kids and wives,” says one woman. “Goddamnit! I’m tired of slavery and sleepless nights.”
Pasquale’s attempt to expand Waiting for Lefty is well intentioned, of course, but proves to be a fatal experiment. Dressing up Odets’ work with songs and dances takes a drama that should appear spontaneous and makes it instead look terribly studied.
Waiting for Lefty opened November 2, 2026, at the Classic Stage Company and runs through November 29. Tickets and information: classicstage.org
