Waiting for Lefty

American Blues Theater (ABT), Chicago’s second oldest Equity ensemble, opens its 2011-2012 season with Clifford Odets’ classic one-act play Waiting for Lefty. Waiting for Lefty, inspired by the New York taxi strike of 1934 and first staged by the Group Theater in 1935, features powerful vignettes that offer a timeless treatise on societal inequities. “We’ve been kicked around so long we’re black and blue from head to toes,” opines a Depression-era American working stiff in Odets’ masterpiece. The New York Times hailed the 1935 staging as “soundly constructed and fiercely dramatic,” and The Los Angeles Times reviewing a September 2010 staging deemed Waiting for Lefty “a paean to Everyman virtues without sounding phony or sentimental… undeniably relevant.”