BUFFALO NEWS REVIEW 1/14/08
"Odets classic play about unions finds some
modern-day champions"
By Ted Hadley BUFFALO NEWS CONTRIBUTING REVIEWER
Three-and-a-Half Stars
The year 1935, cloaked in Depression gray, marked by a paucity of jobs and
a spike in suicides, was nevertheless a very good year for the newly ordained playwright of the proletariat, Clifford Odets.
Odets, a sometime actor for the always creative but often penniless acting
troupe Group Theater, with Elia Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, John Garfield, Stella
and Luther Adler, and Lee Strasberg among its members, wrote a long one-act
play, WAITING FOR LEFTY, in three days.
A paean to the working class, LEFTY was hailed and its author
lionized and cheered by a raucous opening-night crowd. The story of an
exploited group of taxi drivers and corrupt union leaders inspired strikes and
work stoppages. A short time later, Odets first full-length play, AWAKE
AND SING, opened on Broadway to acclaim.
Indeed. A good year beckoned.
Flash forward to 2008. Buffalos Kurt Schneiderman and his edgy
Subversive Theatre Collective are now into the first nights of a WAITING
FOR LEFTY revival, Schneiderman once again championing the cause of union
workers, one that has taken his company to back rooms and lofts, the street
and the New Phoenix Theatre where LEFTY has been reborn.
Odets said that he wanted to talk about the fulfillment of each
individual human being . . . as well as what holds them back and stymies
them. In Subversive Theatres short life, those themes have surfaced over
and over through Schneiderman, on a one-man crusade to honor working people
and their sacrifices, past and present.
WAITING FOR LEFTY begins in a union hall. A strike vote is to be
taken. Tension is in the air, tempers are at the ready. The strike committee
listens to the union chiefs threats; the members boo and catcall. The taxi
drivers await their leader, Lefty Costello. He will settle this. Meanwhile,
the threat of violence intensifies.
The play, without fanfare, drifts into a series of vignettes: the taxi
drivers at home or experiences in other jobs that have brought them to their
present no-win position. Screwed over, as Schneiderman says.
Several of the sketches are brilliantly acted and emotionally potent.
The
scenes transition seamlessly, good work by director Schneiderman, but
cant sustain audience interest entirely. Odets writing surprisingly
falters on occasion, and best efforts cant save these moments.
But the early scenes of indomitable spirit, among a wife, a girlfriend, are wonderfully played. Victor Morales
(born to play heavies), Hasheen DeBerry, Richard Lambert, Kate LoConti, James Wild, Sarah Brown,
Jeffrey Coyle and particularly Bill Schmidt, as the gnarly but feisty
agitator, Agate Keller, provide memorable minutes. Schmidt supplies the final
gut-check for the guys at the hall. Doing the right thing suddenly seems easy.
Odets later denied a brief flirtation with the Communist Party, and he
infamously named names at Sen. Joseph McCarthys witch hunt. So some
career luster is gone. But, like our own actor/author/playwright, and union
activist, 93-year-old Emmanuel Fried, he wrote about people he came to
know; not, as Fried has said, about ideologies and abstractions. And,
for one brief time in 1935, with WAITING FOR LEFTY, Odets got it right.
|
