Waiting For Lefty

When Joe addresses the crowd, he is inspired to push for action and change. He is the first to stand up and speak. But he also admits that a week earlier, he had a very different mindset. Earlier, Joe tells his wife, Edna, that he is helpless. He repeats the line that strikes are ineffective. He is certain that he is expendable, and his job is a privilege. Joe is also terrified of being shot for making trouble or of losing his income and causing his family to starve. But Edna presses upon him that his family is already starving. His children have gone to bed without dinner and are sick from lack of nutrition. Edna forces Joe to see that he will lose everything if nothing changes, and Joe acts because he recognizes that his need is immediate and desperate. Joe shows that the average working man can be empowered by injustice.

Edna is married to Joe. She tells him that she will leave him for an ex-boyfriend who still loves her, insinuating that she has already been in contact with him. Her threats seem cruel at first, but it becomes clear that she is desperate and taking action to motivate Joe. Despite Joe’s doubts, Edna is certain that strikes are effective, because she saw her father take part in one and succeed. But Edna is powerless to force Joe to act or to act on his behalf. Therefore, she takes agency where she can, staging her own strike in the domestic sphere by threatening to take away Joe’s family. Edna has been thoroughly beaten down by poverty, but she shows that she still loves her husband and has no intention of leaving once he is sufficiently inspired.

Miller becomes a driver after losing his job as a lab assistant. Fayette offers him a Faustian bargain. He can have money and job security, but only if he sells his metaphorical soul. The job requires him to help formulate a poisonous gas to be used as a weapon in the next war, which Fayette assures Miller is inevitable. He also must agree to spy on the chemist he is assisting. Although times are desperate, Miller declines without hesitation, even though he knows that he’ll lose his job. Miller demonstrates that it’s possible to have strength of character and ethics that can’t be bought or sold, even during desperate times. He isn’t willing to be part of mass killing at wartime or to sign on to be a disloyal colleague. Along with forfeiting his livelihood, Miller punches Fayette for attempting to corrupt him.

As another representative of capitalist evil, Fayette sees human life as expendable, and morality as a commodity that can be bought. Fayette insists that sentimentality over human lives is antithetical to business. He is banking on another horrific war by financing the creation of a chemical weapon that will allow for widespread killing. Poison gas is a far more indiscriminate method of death, covering a full area rather than eliminating targets. It’s efficient, but also doesn’t differentiate between targets and bystanders. Odets wrote the play in 1935, so any predictions about another world war were merely predictions, but the positing of poisonous gas seems much more prescient in hindsight of the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Florence, or Florrie, is a young woman in love. She has lived her life obediently and dutifully taking care of her sick mother, but her family disapproves of the man she loves because he is a poor taxi driver with no financial prospects for the future. Florence doesn’t want to give up the relationship, even if it means living in poverty and giving up her family. But as we see with Edna, such abject poverty takes an eventual toll on a loving relationship. Their love story is seemingly destined for a morose end if it continues.

Florence’s brother Irv pressures her to end her relationship with Sid. Irv is more realistic than the young lovers and tries to make Florence see that they can’t make a life when Sid is so poor. Irv seems hard-hearted and unsentimental, even threatening violence if Sid won’t agree. Irv reminds Florence that their sick mother needs her to be her caretaker since they can’t afford a hospital.

Sid is a young taxi driver. He loves Florence and has been engaged to her for three years. The couple is forced to face the fact that he cannot make enough money to support a family. Sid’s brother recently joined the military, but like Miller, Sid demonstrates that he has principles that aren’t for sale. If Sid joined the military, he’d undoubtedly earn enough to marry Florence, but he knows that he would also be forced to kill men who are just like him—average and unlucky in life. Sid would rather sacrifice his own happiness than to achieve it by hurting others. Similarly, Sid sacrifices his relationship with the woman he loves to avoid sentencing her to a life of struggling, even when Florence has second thoughts about the breakup. Like the other drivers highlighted, Sid is a genuinely good person.

Fatt introduces Tom Clayton as a fellow worker from Philadelphia, who has travelled two hours by train to tell them about the folly of strikes. Amiably, Clayton tells the workers that he has experienced striking, and that Fatt is correct in saying that it isn’t a good time. But he is exposed by a voice in the audience who reveals that Clayton’s real name is Clancy and that he is his brother. Clayton/Clancy works for a company that hires out men like him to infiltrate unions and break up strikes. Clayton/Clancy demonstrates the underhandedness of the union fat cats like Fatt. While the men are paying dues for unions that represent their best interests, Fatt and his henchmen are only looking out for themselves.

Dr. Benjamin is a cab driver. He was once a skilled surgeon who worked his way to a respected position in a hospital only to lose his job because he is Jewish. Benjamin deplores the classist practices in the hospital, and goes to Dr. Barnes, a hospital administrator, when the surgery on an indigent woman is taken away from him at the last minute and handed to an incompetent surgeon with political connections. Benjamin is devastated when he learns that the patient dies. He considers taking his surgical skills to Russia, where they would be appreciated within their system of socialized medicine. Instead of taking the easy route, he decides to stay and fight to fix the system. Benjamin, like the other cab drivers, shows that his principles are more important than his own self-advancement.

An older hospital administrator, Dr. Barnes is the one who must break the news to Benjamin that a charity ward is closing and that Benjamin is losing his job because he’s Jewish. Barnes sees the problems in the hospital. He hates that nepotism and classism dictate issues of life and death, and that antisemitic policies are more important than medicine. Although Barnes works within his power by voting and speaking up, he isn’t willing to risk his job and potentially find himself unable to support his daughter. Barnes is not an evil character, like Fatt or Fayette, but he is privileged and won’t give up that privilege for others. This separates him from the cab drivers who risk everything, even their lives, to uphold their principles.