David Vegh (Harry Fatt) and company. Photos by Keith Ian Polakoff.
2:00pm | California Repertory Company, positively one of the area’s best and most exciting theatre companies, has chosen to open its 2010-11 season with Waiting for Lefty: Seeing Red, an augmentation1 of Clifford Odets’s classic one-act about a New York taxi-drivers’ union considering the possibility of striking in the milieu of the Great Depression. It’s a fantastic production, my review-cum-political essay of which can be read in this GreaterLongBeach.com article [here].
Cal Rep’s choice to stage such an obvious work of agitprop theatre—one that calls for at least considering capitalism as creating some evils and socialism as providing some solutions—is especially strong in the midst of our own capitalist recession and heated debate wherein the term “socialist” is often heard.
But as loudly as Cal Rep’s choice speaks by itself, Artistic Director Joanne Gordon has more to say. Posted in the passageway to the Royal Theatre aboard the Queen Mary is a lengthy meditation touching upon Cal Rep’s timely choice.”[I]n our hearts we fervently believe that in the pursuit of artistic passion we can reveal something true and just and pure,” she writes. And Gordon feels lying within this 75-year-old play are some harsh truths about our own time:
Our contemporary world is awash with lies, distortions and deceptions. Politicians and the bureaucrats fill the airwaves with self-serving bromides. Through their greedy manipulation of the world financial systems, wealthy plutocrats shatter our faith in economic veracity.
That’s just a small portion of Gordon’s statement, a statement in which she quotes fairly extensively from the 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech of Harold Pinter, who used most of his time in the Stockholm spotlight to excoriate the United States government (and the George W. Bush administration in particular) for its duplicity toward the American people and its opportunistic, incoherent, and often brutal foreign policy.
Pictured right: Vegh and Sam Floto.
Some might say it would have been more tasteful for both Gordon and Pinter to leave personal political proselytizing behind. Art is about entertainment, right? Well, no, it’s not just about that. Or it doesn’t have to be, despite what the dominant strains in pop culture might lead you to believe. At least as far back as Aristotle there was talk that art should serve the individual and society in a beneficial way (by which he meant more than having a good time).
No doubt Cal Rep’s current production is successful aesthetically. But it also succeeds on a different level: it confronts our status quo with an eye toward engendering thought and discussion that might lead us to improve ourselves and our world.
And God knows we could use some improvement. As director Kim Rubinstein says in Cal Rep’s press release for the show:
We are living in depressed, desperate times. […] We walk on the American landscape, juggling greedy desire while attempting to live in safety and decency. Our politics remain confused. We are in great need of a revolution, one that strikes against cruelty and injustice and pumps the grandness of the human heart, moment to moment, in our daily lives.
There’s a classic line I’ll be you’ve heard even if you don’t know it’s from the brilliant Paddy Chayefsky/Sidney Lumet film Network: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” As Cal Rep says in the press release’s headline, they are beginning their new season “with a call to resistance.”
Clearly, this isn’t just Odets’s call. With their staging of Waiting for Lefty: Seeing Red, Cal Rep is artistically agitating for change2. See the play, and see what I mean.
WAITING FOR LEFTY: SEEING RED CALIFORNIA REPERTORY CO. • THE ROYAL THEATRE ABOARD THE QUEEN MARY (1126 QUEENS HWY) • LONG BEACH 90802 • 562.985.5526 CALREP.ORG • TUES-SAT 8PM, EXCEPT IT’S 6PM OCT 1–2, 8–9, & 15–16 • $15–$20 (PARKING $6–$8—BUT YOU CAN TAKE THE PASSPORT FOR FREE) • THROUGH OCT 16
Footnotes
1I.e., with scenes from other Odets plays.
2No, not like the Tea Party.