Brian Willetts and Hallie Martenson as Joe and Edna.
Have to stay living with your parents long after college? Can’t find a job that pays enough to give you a real start in life while you quake in fear you’ll lose the crappy one you have? Who’s going to care for the ailing parents? Feel the economic deck is unjustly stacked against you and your family?
That isn’t Occupy New Haven 2012 speaking but the voices of the New Haven Theater Company‘s stirring revival of Waiting for Lefty, the classic 1935 Clifford Odets play about the spirit-shattering effects of the Great Depression.
The play runs for only four performances Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. in the basement space at 118 Court St.
Allan Appel Photo
Director Steve Scarpa as the union organizer Keller.
During a rehearsal Tuesday night, director Steve Scarpa acknowledged that the play’s anti-capitalist and heroic pro-union messages both date it and make it propaganda — but “moving propaganda.” He said the scenes work because beneath the pitch-perfect ranting and speechifying is a deep and universal cri de coeur for human worth and dignity. That’s one of the reasons it resonates today.
“The 1 percent/99 percent [movement], the Tea Party, these are perceptions that things are not as they should be. That’s what this play was,” Scarpa said.
The play is set in a cab drivers’ union hall with flashbacks into the lives of half a dozen cabbies debating whether to strike. Among the most powerful scenes is that between Joe and Edna, played by Brian Willetts and Hallie Martenson.
He can’t earn enough to support her and the two sickly kids. “For five years I laid awake at night listening to my heart pound. For God’s sake, do something, Joe, get wise. … Maybe go on strike for better money,” she says to him.
One of the play’s revelations: how many man were emasculated by the economic disasters of the Great Depression, and how women provided the spark and cohesion.
Hillary Brown plays Florrie, whose brother won’t let her marry a poor cabbie played by Peter Chenot.
Scarpa said that the play’s 1935 premiere not long after a bitter taxi drivers strike in New York was “one of the amazing nights of the American theater.” It elicited 20 to 30 standing ovations for director Harold Clurman and the cast including Elia Kazan, who plays Keller.
Keller is a union organizer who has a glass eye from when it was “hooked out because they didn’t have a shield on the works [in the factory].” Before the play ends with a rousing call to strike, Keller makes a famous speech. “It’s war!” he declares. “Working class, unite and fight! Tear down the slaughter house of our old lives! Let freedom really ring.”
Of the 15 roles in the play, Scarpa chose to play Keller. His grandfather Gennaro Basilio, born in 1883, had worked in a wire factory in New Haven at the turn of the century. “It was a time of no unions and no OSHA. When his grandfather got a fragment of metal in his eye, it became infected. With no available hospital care, he lost the eye.”
While that wouldn’t likely happen today, Hallie Martenson said, she thinks many local activists will come to see the play. “It holds up a mirror to where the city is at,” she said.