Waiting for Lefty

No theater dates more quickly than political theater—that’s the received wisdom, anyway. But what’s anachronistic about Clifford Odets’s 1935 social-protest one-act is less its politics—his attack on profit over people is no less relevant in 2007—than its political mindedness. When contemporary playwriting does address its political climate, it tends to do so either through mechanical, lifeless didacticism or through the antiseptic filter of documentary theater. In Lefty, Odets wrote of working-class people with rugged poetry and passion, treating them not as a vehicle for Shepardian brutalism but as an argument for social change. Framed by a union meeting of strike-hungry cab drivers, Lefty’s series of vignettes cast a wide net of capitalist exploitation, from a hard-up cabbie and his strike-supporting wife, to a lab assistant offered a fat salary in exchange for making chemical-warfare gas, to a talented charity-ward physician ousted for being a Jew. (It’s pretty tough to imagine new plays tackling labor conditions today with the fire that flamed in Odets’s belly.)

In Remington’s period-piece production, actors affect New York-y accents and mistake shrill for fervent (each scene’s energy starts at ceiling level, leaving no place to go); in effect, it runs roughshod over Odets’s poetic plain-speak. While some actors (Christopher Marcum, Joram Coxworth) manage a more natural take, others adopt accepted notions of Depression-era types. This caricature approach misses Odets’s realism and, thus, the idealism borne from it, making both Lefty’s politics and its political mindedness seem more dated than they need be.—Novid Parsi