Reading Clifford Odets’s first produced play, titled Waiting for Lefty, an agit-prop one-act drama loosely based on the New York City taxi strike of 1934, I have been toying with the following scenario in my post-Cold War consciousness: suppose I find a way to transport myself to New York City in 1935, and suppose that I manage to meet with the then fledgling playwright, and on top of everything, suppose that we actually engage ourselves in an informative discussion. I then proceed (boldly!) to suggest that Mr. Odets’s break-through play, Waiting for Lefty, is a solid example of a self-evident communist propaganda.
Would Mr. Odets be in any way offended, alarmed, by my rather normative description of his work? I would like to believe that he wouldn’t necessarily be insulted by the implicit dismissiveness of my “post-modern” remark. And perhaps the simplest way to approach my openly self-assured standpoint is to look at the time, i.e., the historical specificity of the cultural climate in the 1930s U.S. society, surrounding, and thus influencing the creation of Odets’s play.
In 1935, Odets and his leftist-leaning contemporaries did not necessarily view socialist ideas and cherished American ideals, such as individual freedom and equal opportunity, as two sets of diametrically opposed, largely contradictory concepts; rather, they were looked upon as divergent formulations which had stemmed from the same basic human desires. In other words, as Odets and his contemporaries were embracing Marxist ideas regarding the organization of social structures and social relations, they also sought to find a way to implement these concepts in their work, which in turn, would reflect on the deference of the American Dream by the tyrannical practices of 1930s American imperialism. Thus, Waiting for Lefty could be viewed as a rather odd innovation: an all-American socialist call for civil disobedience.
(Un)fortunately, most (salt-of-the-earth) contemporaries of Odets did not view Marxist theory as a liberating practice. After the October Revolution of 1917, the Soviet Union’s communist system was considered antithetical to the fundamental principles governing American democracy. Even though the years of the Great Depression brought more Americans closer to leftist-oriented ideas, the stereotype revolving around the notion of communism as being “un-American” remained in circulation and continued to fuel anti-Communist propaganda. However, if we apply a close textual analysis to Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, we can attest to an artistic attempt to counter this stereotype by depicting revolutionaries whose actions are positively rooted in American mainstream cultural ideas. This way, audience members who saw themselves as ‘through and through American’ may be persuaded to reshuffle their opinions and positions.
In the opening sequence of the play, Odets introduces us to the character of the arrogant union “boss”, Harry Fatt. As Fatt builds his case against the union’s involvement in a mass action (namely, going on strike), by evoking the traditional stereotype of “reds” taking over the union in case of a strike, he is soon confronted by the character of Joe Mitchell, whose patriotism is beyond question (he defended his country’s ‘way of life’ in the First World War). Joe stands up for what he believes in, and at that moment in their intertwined social lives, he propels the workers’ need to unite in their beliefs and go on strike, an act which will not ruin everything that is good and honest about their lives, but rather make it possible to last. The other men, individual workers we encounter throughout the play’s seven episodes, are made of the same cloth as Joe: they are hard-working family men, standing in for true American values. While they confront the corrupting nature of their exploitative “bosses”, they work to defend the notion that “all men are created equal”, employing ideas that have been previously discarded as “alien”, “foreign”, but at the same time, ubiquitously American.
While Odets has been often reproached for his crude tactics of oversimplifying social relationships, painting everything in “black and white” terms, Waiting for Lefty gives the audience a panoramic view at the Great Depression Era political milieu and all of its idiosyncrasies. Nonetheless, can our post-everything sensibilities “buy into” Odets’s almost too-idealistic efforts? I suppose it all depends on what we look for in art and its power of representation.
Some contemporary critics have remarked that Odets’s play “lacks depth…as it simplifies, in the most blatant way, both the problem and the solution.” For me personally, Odets’s play in its entirety (structure and content) allows us, postmodern cynics, to see how contrasting and certainly conflicting views of/ about American social thought could be filtered through the same lens, that of art and its role as a culture’s conscience barometer.
Stern, Frederick C., “A Review of Waiting for Lefty”, Educational Theatre Journal, Volume 27, no. 3, October 1975, p. 412.
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