Waiting For Lefty ★★★★

Clifford Odets’ breakthrough play Waiting for Lefty might be more than 90 years old, but its political issues remain excruciatingly resonant. Poverty. Classism. Corruption. Exploitation. Labor politics. Discrimination. The futility of war. Political connections prioritized over competence.

The Classic Stage Company’s revival of Odets’ classic work is a passionate expression of the desperation of the 1930s depression, a time when, in Odets’ words, parents put their children to bed early “so they won’t know they missed a meal.”

Lefty’s setting is a 1935 union meeting of New York City taxi drivers debating whether to go out on strike. In real life, thousands of cab drivers had indeed gone on strike the previous year over starvation wages and high fleet owners’ daily lease fees, prompting violent riots across the city and – eventually – the introduction of the taxi medallion system.

The play is set at a union hall meeting, with the divided workers waiting for the arrival of their leader, Lefty Costello, to offer guidance. Their debates are interspersed with vignettes showcasing the hardships they’re facing in the broken economy: a couple’s marriage crumbles as their furniture is repossessed and their children go hungry; a worker is ousted from his job for refusing to make poison gas or spy on a colleague; a talented doctor is forced to become a cab driver after being replaced by a senator’s incompetent nephew (but that’s overlooked because the nephew is only operating on a “charity case ”)

Such was the play’s power that it was banned in several U.S. cities during the 1930s because of its labor politics and claims that it was communist propaganda.

Actor-singer Steven Pasquale (American Son, The Robber Bridegroom, Rescue Me) makes his directorial debut with this production, amping up its outmoded one-act format by adding original music from the Yeller Tooth team of Sahar Milani and Cameron Scoggins and choreography by Susan Misner.

The Milani/Scoggins arrangements include workers’ protest songs, opening with the haunting refrain of Bella Ciao – once sung by women laborers protesting harsh conditions in 19^th-century Italian rice paddies and later the anti-fascist anthem for World War II Italian partisans – before moving into a poignant union prayer. (“Will prayer change shacks into decent homes? Will prayer give jobs at honest pay? Will prayer bring stomachs full of food? If all these things my prayers can do I’ll pray till I am black and blue.”)

Misner (Fosse/Verdon, Halston) provides elegant choreography, including fluid mood arrangements connecting the vignettes, a touching duet between a long-courting couple who cannot afford to marry, and a dynamic attack sequence on the enigmatic Lefty.

The ensemble cast of Tala Ashe, Raffi Barsoumian, Austin Durant, Greg Hildreth, Adam Kantor, Doireann Mac Mahon, Zach McNally, and Henry Stram all turn in marvelous singing and acting performances as they shift seamlessly into multiple roles.

Pasquale also remains faithful to the original staging concept of planting cast members in the audience to encourage audience participation – particularly in the response to the final question by a pro-strike unionist: “Well, what’s the answer?” (Theatergoers of the 1930s responded with gusto, with writer Harold Clurman describing in his book The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the Thirties a “delirious” audience storming the stage.)

Somewhat disappointing is that the sum of this production doesn’t always add up to the strength of its talented parts.

The transitions between the individual vignettes occasionally lend a slightly disjointed feel to the production, perhaps because – with each performer playing several roles – it’s not always intuitive that protagonists like the principled chemist are now one of the cab drivers rather than a random new character.