Union Hall, Steven Pasquale Turns Waiting for Lefty into a Full Evening

East 13th Street has a union hall this month, and the meeting has already started.

Classic Stage Company began previews of Waiting for Lefty on Thursday, October 15, in its Lynn F. Angelson Theater at 136 East 13th Street. The run is limited and ends Sunday, November 22. It is also the first time Steven Pasquale, the Broadway actor and singer, has directed a show.

A Play About Waiting

Clifford Odets wrote the piece in 1935. It follows Depression-era New York cab drivers who gather in a union hall to decide whether to strike, while they wait for a leader who never shows up. Short scenes from the drivers' lives break up the meeting.

The play has deep New York roots. According to American Theatre, it was inspired by the 1934 New York taxi strike. Odets sat in on a meeting of cab drivers where the union president, Samuel Orner, was speaking, and Orner later said many of the play's lines came straight from that room.

It premiered in January 1935 at the old Civic Repertory Theatre on 14th Street, according to the University of Washington's Civil Rights and Labor History Consortium. The Group Theatre priced tickets between 50 cents and $1.50 so the working people it portrayed could afford to come. At the end, audiences answered the actors' call with shouts of "Strike! Strike!" The Group co-founder Harold Clurman later wrote that the actors were no longer performing but "were being carried along as if by the exultancy of communication."

The play opened on Broadway at the Longacre Theatre on March 26, 1935, and ran 144 performances, American Theatre reports. Its simple set and costumes made it easy to stage, and productions soon ran in 32 cities at once.

What He Added

The play is short. On Broadway in 1935 it shared a double bill with Odets's Till the Day I Die. Playbill reports that Pasquale and his team set out to make what he calls "a Brechtian, full evening of Waiting for Lefty," and that the theater itself is turned into a high-stakes union hall.

"It's just a spectacular piece of writing." Steven Pasquale, to BroadwayWorld's Richard Ridge

Pasquale told BroadwayWorld that the company is asking a lot of the same questions audiences were asking in 1935.

The additions are music and movement. Yeller Tooth, the duo of Sahar Milani and Cameron Scoggins, wrote the original music and arrangements, and Susan Misner handles the movement. BroadwayWorld says historically inspired labor and protest songs help carry the story.

Milani, who is also in the cast, makes the case for them. "The music that we're singing isn't just art, it's a tool of the people," she told BroadwayWorld.

The company is Milani, Scoggins, Tala Ashe, Raffi Barsoumian, Austin Durant, Greg Hildreth, Adam Kantor, Doireann Mac Mahon, Zach McNally and Henry Stram. CSC bills Ashe as a Tony nominee for English, Kantor from The Band's Visit and Stram from Network. The design team is Scott Adam Davis on sets, Márion Talán de la Rosa on costumes, Mextly Couzin on lighting and Palmer Hefferan on sound.

What to Know Before You Go

Previews run until opening night, which is set for Monday, November 2, according to CSC's announcements via Playbill and BroadwayWorld. TDF lists full-price tickets from $66 to $236, and tickets are sold through classicstage.org.

CSC has built in a labor discount that fits the play. Union and guild members can buy $30 rush seats starting an hour before curtain with a union card or a membership email. There is also a $40 general rush and a $30 student rush at the box office, and $48 rush tickets on TodayTix, released at 9 a.m. on the day of each show. On Tuesday, October 20, at 7 p.m., a $40 Under 40 night uses the code CLASSIC40.

For another night of political theater downtown, see our piece on Kramer/Fauci in DUMBO.

The meeting is called to order. Lefty still has not come.