A timely play on unions from Quintessence Theatre Group

At a time when approval of unions is at its highest in decades and amid high-profile union organizing campaigns at warehouses and coffee shops, Quintessence Theatre Group’s production of Waiting for Lefty, the 1935 play by Philadelphia-born playwright Clifford Odets, couldn’t be more on target.

“The issues of the play are really present today,” said director Kyle Haden, who fell in love with Odets’ works in college and thought of Waiting for Lefty in 2021 while reading news accounts of workers trying to unionize an Amazon warehouse in New York.

“It’s the same struggle,” said Haden, a member of Actors’ Equity Association, along with some cast members.

Waiting for Lefty takes place at a meeting of city cabdrivers where they are trying to decide whether to go on strike.

Odets finished the play in 1935, a year after 10,000 cabbies struck in New York.

“There will be ways in which the actors will interface with the audience,” Haden said. “We’re casting the audience as part of the cabdriver meeting. The intent is to make you feel you are part of the cabbies, and you have to decide whether to join the strike.”

In the play, the cabbies are waiting for Lefty, the head of the union’s strike committee, and wondering what happened to him. Meanwhile, in a series of vignettes, characters lay out their mixed motivations.

Will the strike help or harm? Who will be helped? Who will be harmed? Who has something to prove? Who is playing both sides?

It’s all part of the play. Just as Odets was writing Waiting for Lefty in the aftermath of the 1934 taxi strike, Haden and the cast of 10 were rehearsing Lefty in Philadelphia as New York taxi and Uber drivers struck earlier this month over a pay dispute.

“Reinvigorating classic plays,” Haden said, is an interest he shares with Alexander Burns, Quintessence’s artistic director. Burns has made that passion central to the Mount Airy theater company’s mission.

“As a Black man, I’m particularly interested in taking classic plays and putting Black and brown people in them,” said Haden, an assistant professor of acting at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also serves as the senior associate head of the School of Drama.

“How can we accomplish the plays of yesterday with the people of today?”

(Jan. 18-Feb. 12, “Waiting for Lefty,” Quintessence Theatre Group, 7137 Germantown Ave. Post-matinee discussion on Odets, the 1934 taxi strike, and political theater on Jan. 29. 215-987-4450, or quintessencetheatre.org)

Playwright Charles Fuller used his experiences in the military and growing up in a tough North Philadelphia housing project to inform the drama in A Soldier’s Play, opening at the Forrest Theatre, part of the Kimmel Cultural Campus.

The play, about complex issues of racism among Black soldiers at a segregated Louisiana Army base during World War II, earned Fuller a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1982. He also earned an Oscar nomination for the screen adaptation, renamed A Soldier’s Story.

Molefi Kete Asante, a Temple University professor, said Fuller had told him that he eventually moved to Canada because the Philadelphia theater community had not appreciated his work. However, before Fuller’s death on Oct. 3, he was aware and pleased that A Soldier’s Play would be presented in Philadelphia, his son, David Fuller, said.

Philadelphia audiences will see the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of A Soldier’s Play, which won a 2020 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.

(Jan. 24-Feb. 5, “A Soldier’s Play’: Forrest Theatre, 1114 Walnut St., 215-893-1999, kimmelculturalcampus.org)

One of Italy’s most respected contemporary theater companies, Teatro delle Albe, presents the U.S. premiere of fedeli d’Amore at the University of Pennsylvania’s Harold Prince Theatre. Written as a polyptych in seven panels, fedeli d’Amore (Love’s Faithful) uses vocal, musical, and visual dramaturgy. It is based on the last visions of Dante Alighieri, as the Italian poet passed from life to death. Teatro delle Able is cofounded by Marco Martinelli, who wrote the work, and Ermanna Montanari, who performs it. Presented in Italian with English supertitles. Music by Luigi Ceccarelli.

(Jan. 20-21, “fedeli d’Amore,” Harold Prince Theatre, 3680 Walnut St., 215-898-3900, or pennlivearts.org)

If you missed Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley at the Stagecrafters Theater in November, you have another chance to catch the romantic sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice by the Old Academy Players as it celebrates its 100th season in East Falls.

In this play by Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon, overlooked sister Mary Bennet comes to the forefront as she forges her own path. Jane Jennings directs.

(Jan. 13-29, “Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley,” Old Academy Players, 3544 Indian Queen Lane, 215-843-1109, or oldacademyplayers.org)