Historical Context

It is almost impossible to discuss the work of Clifford Odets without spending some time focusing on his relationship to the Group Theatre, of which he was an original member, and on the broader genre of American political theatre that arose during the Great Depression. The Group Theatre was, as Gerald Weales suggests in his essay "The Group Theatre and its Plays," "a community of artists" and "the most successful failure in the history of American theatre." The Group Theatre lasted as an organization for ten years spanning the decade of the 1930s. During that time they produced seven of Odets's plays. Founded by George Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg, the group also started or significantly directed the careers of actors, such as John Garfield, and directors, such as Elia Kazan, who would later go on to direct some of the most important films in the history of Hollywood cinema. The group leaned decidedly to the left, and a number of its members were also members of the Communist Party during the 1930s. Indeed, Odets and Kazan would discuss this fact at length when they both appeared before Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Commission in the 1950s.

Odets made a name for himself as a playwright with two plays produced by the Group Theatre in 1935, Awake and Sing! and Waiting for Lefty. Both of these plays can be considered works of agitprop (agitation-propaganda), a type of progressive, politically serious drama produced in America after the stock market crash of 1929. Waiting for Lefty, written while Odets was a member of the Communist Party, was the most successful of these plays. It eventually played in over one hundred cities in 1935 and was performed throughout the 1930s. On its opening night in New York, the audience responded to the play by rushing the stage to congratulate the actors after the final curtain. Given that the play is about a conflict between striking New York cab drivers and a corrupt union boss, its reception was hardly surprising. As Christopher J. Herr points out in Clifford Odets and American Political Theatre,"in 1934 alone, almost 2,000 strikes had broken out across the country, including violent conflicts in Toledo, Minneapolis, Harlan County, Kentucky, and San Francisco." Michael Denning notes, in the Introduction to The Cultural Front, that the national textile strike of 1934, involving over 400,000 workers, "became the largest strike in a single industry in American history." Odets had found a set of themes that spoke to the millions of unemployed, under-employed, and disenfranchised citizens of America feeling the lasting and debilitating effects of the crash of 1929 and the depression that followed.

That Odets had struck a cord with the American public is perhaps proved most effectively by the fact that Waiting for Lefty was, according to Wendy Smith (quoted in Michael Denning's The Cultural Front), the "most widely banned" play in America. Given the social and economic conditions under which Odets and the majority of Americans were living, it is no surprise that he found his greatest early success with dramas about the socioeconomic conditions of the 1930s. Precipitated by the stock market crash of October 1929, the Great Depression affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Unemployment rates skyrocketed and farms and homes were repossessed by banks and lending companies.