Waiting for Lefty

Waiting for Lefty

    Author: Clifford Odets

    First Performance: 1935, New York

    Published: 1935

    Genre: Pol. drama in 7 scenes

    Setting: Union meeting, New York, 1935

    Cast: 14m, 3f

Harry Fatt, leader of the New York taxi drivers' union, urges his members to accept the low pay on offer and to resist calls for a strike. The drivers, planted in the audience, call for Lefty Costello, their militant spokesman, but he is delayed. While they wait, Joe Mitchell, a member of the strike committee, suggests that the drivers enact scenes from their own lives, showing why a strike is inevitable:

    (1) Joe's wife Edna, who has just seen their furniture repossessed, threatens to leave him if he doesn't have the courage to strike.

    (2) A former laboratory assistant shows how he refused to work secretly on...

[The entire page is 413 words long]

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