Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty

Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty is an Off-Broadway revival of a one-act play from 1935. Classic Stage Company (CSC), a classical Off-Broadway company founded in 1967, is producing it as the first show of its 2026–27 season, in a limited engagement at its Lynn F. Angelson Theater. Steven Pasquale directs, and it is his first time directing a production.

The setting is a union meeting of taxi drivers in New York City during the Great Depression. The men have gathered to vote on a strike and are waiting for Lefty Costello, the chairman they elected, to arrive. While they wait, short scenes show what pushed the people in the room to this point. Odets drew the meeting from the New York City taxi drivers' strike of 1934.

It was the first of Odets's plays to be produced, and it brought him wide fame as a playwright in the 1930s.

The evening is built as one meeting with flashbacks cut into it. In the hall, the union boss Harry Fatt tries to keep the drivers calm and at work, while Lefty's empty chair becomes the thing everyone is watching. Men from the floor begin to stand and speak, and each speech opens into a scene from that person's life.

Joe, a driver and war veteran, is among the first. His scene takes us home to his wife Edna, where the bills have outrun the pay and she tells him he has to fight for a living wage. Another follows Florrie and Sid, who want to marry but cannot afford to, while Florrie's brother Irv urges her to find someone who earns more.

The play also leaves the cab business behind. A lab assistant, Miller, is offered a raise by the industrialist Fayette if he will help develop poison gas and quietly report on his own superior. In a hospital, the young Dr. Benjamin learns that the charity ward is closing and that his job is at risk for reasons that have nothing to do with his skill.

Odets built the script as a frame with linked vignettes hung inside it. The meeting is the frame, and the audience is treated as part of that meeting rather than as onlookers. The published edition describes the play as being in six scenes.

The original staging was deliberately plain. Odets's stage directions call for a bare stage, actors planted among the audience and characters who speak straight to the house. That simplicity helped it travel: hundreds of theater groups asked for the rights after the first run, and it became a fixture of union halls and small theaters.

In its original form the script runs about 40 minutes, roughly 30 pages, so it is usually staged alongside another one-act. Odets later testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and denied basing the play on the taxi strike.

CSC says the staging uses music and movement to recast the theater as a union hall where a great deal is at stake. Pasquale calls it semi-immersive: the evening is meant to start as though the audience might be watching a simple reading, then build until the room feels like a real union meeting. He has described the result as a full evening built from a play that usually fills only half of one. The theater seats the audience on three sides of the playing space, in a house of 199 seats.

As of October 2026, Edna is played by Tala Ashe and Joe by Raffi Barsoumian; Sahar Milani is Florrie, Cameron Scoggins is Sid Stein and Doireann Mac Mahon is Irv. Greg Hildreth plays the union boss Harry Fatt, Austin Durant is Miller and Henry Stram is Dr. Barnes. Adam Kantor and Zach McNally round out the company of ten, with McNally in a featured movement role. All of the actors also play ensemble members.

As of October 2026, the music is played live by the cast: the violin is Mac Mahon's, and Milani and Scoggins, a married couple who perform as the duo Yeller Tooth, handle guitar, with Scoggins also on banjo. The score draws on older labor songs, newly rearranged, alongside protest material and movement. Pasquale wanted a rough, working-class Americana sound of strings and voices.

Waiting for Lefty was first performed on January 6, 1935, at the Civic Repertory Theatre in New York, at a Sunday benefit for New Theatre magazine. It reached Broadway at the Longacre Theatre on March 26, 1935, and ran for 144 performances. In September 1935 it moved to the Belasco Theatre for 24 performances in repertory with Odets's Awake and Sing!. The Broadway cast included Odets himself, Elia Kazan and Lee J. Cobb.

At its 1935 opening in Boston, four cast members were arrested under the city's censorship laws. The British premiere was at Unity Theatre in London in 1936, and a 2013 revival at the White Bear Theatre was the first London staging in more than 30 years.

This CSC production began previews on October 15, 2026. As of October 2026, opening night is set for November 2, 2026, and a separate Manhattan Theatre Club revival of Awake and Sing!, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, is set to begin previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on December 15, 2026.