This show was produced from September 10-October 3, 2010

Waiting For Lefty

By Clifford Odets

Directed By Joseph M. Paprzycki & Jordan Feld

STARRING

Randall McCann • Kevin Costello • Jen Beatty • Michael Hogan • Dan Hickey • Steve Carpenter • Dani Lencioni • Ryan Walker • James Kiesel • Reuben Mitchell * Edward Monterosso • Jason Cutts • Tom Juarez • Michael Schwartz • Jamal Douglass

“WAITING FOR LEFTY used a drab brick set with mismatched chairs to set the scene of what was to come. With this play, Clifford Odets defined to the theatrical world what would become known as “agit-prop” theater. The agit-prop genre is a combination of Agitation and Propaganda. Odets never intended this to amuse or to be light-hearted entertainment. He wanted to use the social power of theater to encourage political and personal change.”

WAITING FOR LEFTY is a series of varied episodes that blend into a powerful mosaic of the American working class. We begin in a hiring hall where a union leader (obviously in the pay of the bosses) is trying to convince a committee of workers (who are waiting for their leader, Lefty, to arrive) not to strike. Through flashback and vignette, we then visit a discouraged taxi driver in confrontation with his wife, who wants him to show some backbone and stand up to his employer; an employee promised a major promotion in exchange for spying on a fellow worker; a young cabbie and his would-be bride who lack the wherewithal to get married; and a senior doctor charged with dismissing a bright, promising intern.

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Funding has been made possible in part by the Camden County Cultural & Heritage Commission at Camden County College, through the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.