Waiting for Lefty
Characters: Cab drivers Joe Mitchell and Sid Phillips
Fashion statement: No costumes as this was a play reading
rather than a performance, but Peter did show up in his trademark
tight jeans.
Deathless dialogue: Honey, I rode the wheels off the chariot
today.
Peter appared with actress Tracy-Ann Oberman at the National Theatre
on 4 March 1999 to read excerpts from Clifford Odets' 1935 play,
Waiting for Lefty. The reading was part of the NT2000 series,
a year-long series of platforms charting and celebrating the progress
of drama through the 20th century, as represented by 100 plays.
From the theater program:
Waiting for Lefty tells the story of a New York taxi drivers'
strike. Using an impressionistic flashback technique, Odets presents
the meeting of the drivers, interspersed with scenes displaying
their situation: Edna, wife of one of the dirvers and desperate
for money to feed and clothe their children, encourages Joe to
strike; a lab assistant is asked by his boss to help in the manufacture
of poison gas, and to spy on his colleague; a young couple decide
they can't afford to marry; a doctor is fired when the hospital
starts closing wards. Lefty, the popular committee man of the
title, like Godot 20 years later, never appears, but when news
comes that he has been murdered, the men are roused to decisive
action.
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