Waiting for Lefty

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Waiting for Lefty is a 1935 play by the American playwright Clifford Odets; it was his first play to be produced. Consisting of a series of related vignettes, the entire play is framed by a meeting of cab drivers who are planning a labor strike. The framing uses the audience as part of the meeting.

The play debuted on Sunday, January 6, 1935, at the Civic Repertory Theatre on 14th Street, as part of a benefit performance for New Theatre magazine. It premiered on Broadway at the Longacre Theatre on March 26, 1935, under the auspices of the Group Theatre, a New York City theatre company founded by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg, of which Odets was a member. The company was founded as a training ground for actors, and also to support new plays, especially those that expressed the social and political climate of the day. The play was requested by many theater and labor groups in numerous other cities around the United States. It premiered in London in 1936 at Unity Theatre, and was revived there most recently in 2013.