Playwright: Clifford Odets. At: Oracle Theatre, 3809 N. Broadway. Tickets: 252-220-0269; www.publicaccesstheatre.org; free. Runs through: July 27
We're in a meeting of New York City taxi drivers who are contemplating strike. While their boss, Harry Fatt, attempts to dissuade them from this plan and the cabbies wait for union-leader Lefty to arrive so they can vote on their course of action, we see into the minds of the working men as they recall the experiences spurring them to actionhungry children, dissatisfied wives, courting couples too poor to marry, scientists forced to manufacture biological weapons and spy on their colleagues, charity patients dying in hospitals where doctors are hired on the basis of their political connections rather than their medical expertise. By the time we learn the reason for Lefty's delayed appearance, we are not shocked.
Dramatically, Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty is as irrevocably tied to its historical period as William Pratt's Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, but while the social crimes ascribed to alcohol addiction in 1868 meet with skepticism today, pro-union sentiments as they existed in 1935 have lost none of their allure for audiences in 2013 ever-ready to denounce capitalism and its stereotypical representations. Given that this unabashedly propagandistic view doesn't leave much room for argument, a certain similarity is inevitable in productions of this American classic .
Oracle Theatre director Matt Foss solves the problem by recounting his fable predominantly through visual imagery. In the room where we are seated amid the drivers, musclemen (and maybe a lone communist infiltrator or government informer), each scene is announced by having its name scratched onto the dispatcher's chalkboard. Later, a young swain traces his girl friend's silhouette on another wallgraffiti that will subsequently be transformed into the victim of a botched surgical operation.
This doesn't mean that the story is told entirely in silence. Jeremy Clark chews cigars and scenery with ursine relish as the corrupt Fatt. John Arthur Lewis projects a different kind of menace as his icy "enforcer" and an almost-invisible lab tech quietly dropping toy soldiers into a jar of ominous-looking fluid. Against such formidable villains, Dylan Stuckey, Stephanie Polt and a chorale-singing ensemble struggle mightily to ascertain that virtue triumphsa victory that Justin Snyder's spectacular special effects render far from finalbut at a running time of 55 minutes with no admission fee, Oracle Theatre's fresh and vibrant take on an old sermon emerges as one of those hidden gems so often found on the storefront circuit.