Yeller Tooth's Folk Score Gives 'Waiting for Lefty' a New Pulse

By Elena Vasquez

Classic Stage Company has revived Clifford Odets's 1935 play "Waiting for Lefty," with original music by the folk duo Yeller Tooth carrying a production staged by the actor Steven Pasquale. The show draws on the real-life New York cabdriver strike of 1934 for its premise.

Brick walls and a bare stage summon a Depression-era hiring hall for union cabdrivers. Audiences sit on three sides of the action, standing in for scores of unseen drivers who watch a debate over whether to strike because of low wages, high taxes and poor working conditions.

Odets set the play as a union meeting interrupted by vignettes of coupled life and exploitation. A cabdriver named Joe (Raffi Barsoumian) argues the possibility of a strike with his wife, Edna (Tala Ashe, a Tony nominee for "English"). A lab scientist (Austin Durant) confronts a boss (Henry Stram), an industrialist who wants to make poison gas. A mordant doctor (Stram) delivers one of the play's sharpest lines: "doctors don't run medicine in this country. The men who know their jobs don't run anything here, except the motormen on trolley cars."

Why is Odets back now?

Odets is having a moment this fall. In New York, "Lefty" will be followed by a Broadway revival of his family drama "Awake and Sing!" from 1935. A run of "Golden Boy" (1937), starring Josh O'Connor, recently ended in London.

The revival faces two structural challenges in the source text itself. The first is a thicket of dated language. The second is the mostly airless interludes that divert from the meeting's oratorical fire and brimstone.

Pasquale's staging is earnestly heartfelt, matching Odets's cri de coeur for equality and fair treatment. Actors playing drivers sometimes interject from the audience, ready to argue with the self-serving union boss, Harry Fatt (Greg Hildreth), who tries to stave off a strike from the stage.

What changes in the title character?

The play's heroic Godot-like title character never appears in the original. Lefty, the absent chairman-elect of the strike committee, remains offstage. Pasquale's major tweak brings him to life, played by Zach McNally, in strange moments of expressive movement created by choreographer Susan Misner.

The gain is unclear. Lefty's silent presence in ghostly, slow-motion tableaus adds mystery but no resolution. A visible Lefty still leaves the audience waiting — the play's central device, it turns out, does not need a body.

What does the music add?

The production's inspired, glorious addition is the music and arrangements of Yeller Tooth, the married folk duo of Sahar Milani and Cameron Scoggins. They composed original music and reanimated folk and protest standards, including:

• "Diggers Song," a 17th-century ballad
• Florence Reece's "Which Side Are You On?" (1931)
• Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney's "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" (1932)
• John Paul O'Connor's "Carpal Tunnel" (2006)

The score spans nearly four centuries of protest song, binding Odets's 1935 labor drama to a living folk tradition. Takeaway: the music, more than any staging choice, gives this dated play its refreshing heart.

With "Awake and Sing!" headed to Broadway, this "Lefty" arrives as the first test of whether Odets's Depression-era anger can hold a contemporary New York audience.