New Plays in Manhattan

Till the Day I Die & Waiting for Lefty (by Clifford Odets; Group Theatre, producer). If an out-of-towner had visited Manhattan last week and on three successive evenings chanced to attend the Theatre Union's Black Pit (TIME, April 1), the Group Theatre's Awake and Sing! (TIME, March 4) and its new double bill, he would probably have gone home with the bewildering conviction that the New York stage had traded the sock & buskin of entertainment for the gavel of Reform.

Playwright Odets' Awake and Sing!, the tale of a family of disadvantaged Bronxites, did not employ all of the Group's acting company. And his short play, Waiting for Lefty, was not long enough to be presented alone. So the Group got him to whip together a brief companion piece, issued them both together. Till the Day I Die, the companion piece, passes the 60 minutes before Waiting for Lefty starts, and that is about all.

Waiting for Lefty, whose locale is closer to home, is another matter entirely. Transforming the audience into a meeting of a New York taxicab union. Playwright Odets uses the stage as a rostrum for union officials and committeemen. Question before the house is whether to call a taxi strike. It soon becomes plain that the union bosses have sold out the cabdrivers to the fleet owners, are trying to prevent a walkout. But a militant section, led by one Lefty, pleads for action. Lefty seems to have been delayed, and while awaiting his arrival there are a series of ingenious, brief flashbacks, indicating the misery of the hackmen's conditions. When it turns out that Lefty has been murdered, the Group's acting company puts on the most rousing finale that has been seen uptown in years.

Of Manhattan's three current major stage associations, two can be located instantly. The Theatre Guild, in its 16th year, is enjoying a prosperous maturity of artistic and box office successes. If it has any political classification, it is Dead Centre.

Just as Left as Left can be is the Theatre Union on 14th Street. It puts on bright Red class struggle dramas, such as the current arraignment of West Virginia mineowners. Black Pit.

The Group Theatre has been social-minded ever since its inception in 1931. To put on a theatrical fireball which was too hot for it to handle officially, the Theatre Guild in 1929-30 employed a subsidiary, the Guild Studio, to do Red Dust and Roar China, two plays fresh from Moscow. Following year, with Guild money and a Guild script, the Group Theatre, mostly Guild alumni, evolved from the Guild Studio. It presented The House of Connelly as its first play. The social implications concerned the deterioration of Southern landowners. A more sardonic aspect of the U. S. scene was Success Story, the Group's most promising offering in 1932. The 1933 Pulitzer Prize went to Men in White, which had some bitter comments to make on the interference of Capitalism with Medicine (TIME, Oct. 9, 1933). With Awake and Sing! and Waiting for Lefty, the latter a frank appeal for Communist action to end the abuses of "the System," the Group this year ends its progress Leftwards.

The 25 actors and three directors of the Group form a co-operative association. Four years of hard times (the Shuberts managed to pocket a good share of the Men in White proceeds) and an identity of theatrical ideals has bound them closely together. In ability they are not evenly matched. Lee Strasberg is probably the most distinguished and experienced director of the Group. Luther & Stella Adler, J. Edward Bromberg and Alexander Kirkland had theatrical names before they joined the Group, are its top-flight actors. Kirkland's substitution for Franchot Tone is the only important change in the Group's lineup since it started. From opulent Hollywood, Actor Tone recently sent back $5,000 to help his onetime colleagues put on Awake and Sing!

At present the most important man in the organization is Clifford Odets, who has revealed himself as not just an actor of bit parts, but as a playwright who can turn out the sort of thing the Group wants to do. Unconsciously he gathered material for Awake and Sing! during his 20- year residence in The Bronx. Now 28, he spent his professional apprenticeship as a spear-carrier on the road in stock and with the Guild, serving as a radio announcer in between times. He wrote Waiting for Lefty while the Group was in Boston last year. He says he wrote part of Awake and Sing! while cooking for fellow Groupers in their seven-room flat. A Jew like half of the Group's personnel, he likes music, plays the harmonica, is unmarried. With the proceeds of his recent successes he bought an electric phonograph. Since any man who has two hits on Broadway can command his own price in Hollywood, Broadway observers wondered how long Playwright Odets would be satisfied with his electric phonograph.

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