In ‘Waiting for Lefty,’ Class Struggle Remains Unfinished Business

Here’s a timely math equation. Jalen Brunson, the basketball superstar and local hero who helped lead the New York Knicks to their historic championship back in June, will now make 38 million dollars a season playing for the team, but he would still need to play 26,316 seasons to be worth as much as Elon Musk.That fun fact is detailed, more playfully and without using Mr. Musk’s name — Mr. Brunson is simply contrasted with “the planet’s first…TRILLIONAIRE” — on flyers handed out to audience members at Classic Stage Company’s superb, sobering new production of “Waiting for Lefty,” the short, eviscerating takedown of social and economic inequality that announced Clifford Odets’s arrival as a major-league American playwright.First produced in 1935, as the country was reeling from the Great Depression, “Lefty” uses a union meeting of New York cab drivers trying to organize a strike as a framing device, weaving in vignettes in which mostly working-class people grapple with all manner of injustice. Often considered the first native-born work of agitprop theater, the play did not escape the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee when it summoned Odets nearly two decades later.You need hardly be a communist, though, to recognize that more than 90 years after its premiere, Odets’s one-act indictment of a system in which mind-blowing wealth and influence can co-exist with devastating poverty carries fresh resonance. And Steven Pasquale, an accomplished stage actor making his directorial debut with this production, has taken a new approach that links past to present.A veteran of musical theater, Mr. Pasquale does this in part by incorporating music and movement. He has enlisted Yeller Tooth, a contemporary folk duo composed of Sahar Milani and Cameron Scoggins, who are also cast members, to provide a haunting original score that’s played on instruments like banjo and violin. Ms. Milani and Mr. Scoggins and other actors also sing, beautifully, period songs and protest anthems such as “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and “Bread and Roses.”Susan Misner’s choreography allows us to see the union leader Lefty Costello, who is only alluded to in the script but is nonetheless central to the plot and themes; played by a graceful Zach McNally, he becomes a silent but consistently moving presence. Other actors pace and grasp and dance and, in one piercing segment, fight between scenes, physically manifesting the struggles of the various characters and offering welcome flashes of humor and warmth.We meet a young woman, poignantly played by Ms. Milani, who must put off marriage and motherhood because the man she loves is too poor and her father can’t afford proper health care for her sick mom. Then there’s the lab assistant, robustly portrayed by Austin Durant, who turns down his industrialist overseer’s demand that he spy on another employee, knowing the refusal will cost him his job.Greg Hildreth lends the right bluster to a corrupt union boss whose bellowing contrasts with the smoother menace that Henry Stram brings to the corporate bully. Actors juggle different roles, so that Mr. Stram gets to show more benevolence as a seasoned physician who must explain to a gifted young surgeon that he’s not only being replaced in a high-risk procedure by an incompetent senator’s nephew, but also losing his position to “an old disease, malignant, tumescent”: Antisemitism.“I wanted to go to Russia,” the Jewish doctor, played by a spry Adam Kantor, muses. “Last week I was thinking about it — the wonderful opportunity to do good work in their socialized medicine.” But when his elder colleague encourages this, he replies, with a hard-earned defiance, “No! Our work’s here — America!”It could be that Mr. Pasquale and CSC timed this staging to coincide with midterm elections. But the picture of humanity under siege painted in “Waiting for Lefty” has lost none of its potency, and regardless of your political inclinations, you’ll likely find this vital, imaginative production hard to shake off.

In ‘Waiting for Lefty,’ Class Struggle Remains Unfinished Business

In ‘Waiting for Lefty,’ Class Struggle Remains Unfinished Business

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