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    A Study Guide for Clifford Odets's "Waiting for Lefty"
    A Study Guide for Clifford Odets's "Waiting for Lefty"
    A Study Guide for Clifford Odets's "Waiting for Lefty"
    Ebook52 pages38 minutes

    A Study Guide for Clifford Odets's "Waiting for Lefty"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Clifford Odets's "Waiting for Lefty," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535842266
    A Study Guide for Clifford Odets's "Waiting for Lefty"

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      A Study Guide for Clifford Odets's "Waiting for Lefty" - Gale

      2

      Waiting for Lefty

      Clifford Odets

      1935

      Introduction

      Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty is a vigorous, confrontational work, based on a 1934 strike of unionized New York cabdrivers. Explicit political messages dominate the play, whose ultimate goal was nothing less than the promotion of a communist revolution in America. Appearing at the height of the Great Depression, the play’s original 1935 production was a critical and popular sensation. Waiting for Lefty was widely staged throughout the country and brought Odets sudden fame. While its dramatic style has long since fallen out of fashion (along with the idealistic politics that inspired it), it is considered a prime example of a genre known as revolutionary or agitprop theatre. (The latter term is a combination of agitation and propaganda.) The idealistic practitioners of agitprop sought to harness the power of drama to a specific political cause and create a people’s theatre for the new world that would follow the revolution.

      A one-act play in eight episodes, Waiting for Lefty is composed of two basic stagings. The main setting is a union hall, where the members wait to take a hotly-contested strike vote. While the corrupt union leader Harry Fatt arrogantly tries to discourage the members from walking out, support for a strike is high, and the workers nervously await the arrival of the leader of the strike faction, Lefty Costello. As they wait, members of the strike committee address the workers, each telling the story of how he came to be involved in the union and convinced of the necessity for a strike. These individual stories are sketched in a series of vignettes, played out in a small spotlit area of the stage. Each is a story of unjust victimization, mirroring Fatt’s heavy-handed attempts to control the union meeting. The building tension and emotion reaches a climax when the news arrives that Lefty has been murdered, and the meeting erupts in a unanimous demand to Strike! Strike!

      Modern audiences may find Waiting for Lefty’s style and dogmatic politics strange and unfamiliar; it is rarely produced and is often characterized as an historical curiosity. More than most dramas, it is the product of a particular time and place—for its overriding concern was to influence that time and place, not to create immortal art, and certainly not to create diverting, light-hearted entertainment. It faced its grim times squarely and offered its audience a stirring vision of hope. In this sense Waiting for Lefty is seen as an important dramatic work that offers historical evidence of the social power and aspirations of theatre.

      Author Biography

      Clifford Odets is best-known for his early, Depression-era dramas, particularly Waiting for Lefty, an overt work of propaganda that tells a story of working-class struggle, intended to promote a socialist revolution. His later works were more conventional in style and content and seldom preached a political message. Though his later work often met with critical and commercial approval, he never regained the prominence he enjoyed in the 1930s. He is primarily associated with the left-wing agitprop (a term defined as political propaganda as proffered through literature, drama, art, and music) theatre of that time.

      Odets was born July 18, 1906, in

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