reprinted from 

May 21, 2006

UNIONS AND THE THEATER
The Broadway Paradox

To the Editor:

Re "Is Lefty Finally Showing Up?" [April 23]:

Charles Isherwood astutely observes that there is a renewed interest in unionism, exemplified by revivals of "The Pajama Game" and "Awake and Sing." The producers he cites are not-for-profit institutions, however. Meanwhile, in Broadway's commercial sector, producers and theater owners are banding together to try to weaken if not eliminate theatrical unions: each week 10 cents of every paid admission is diverted to a strike fund for this very purpose. (The contract of Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the stagehands' union, is up for renegotiation in 2007.)

While I like Mr. Isherwood's idea for a revival of "Waiting for Lefty," instead of dramatizing the plight of Wal-Mart workers, it should shine a light on the union-busting happening behind the scenes on Broadway.

Amy Merlino
New York City

The writer is a member of I.A.T.S.E. Local 18032,
 which represents theater managers and press agents.

reprinted from 

Is Lefty Finally Showing Up?

By Charles Isherwood

Published: April 23 , 2006

"Strike, strike, strike!!!"

Those words, howled at the audience at the end of "Waiting for Lefty," launched Clifford Odets's career and brought a fierce new political consciousness to the American stage.

But you don't see Odets's drama about rebellious taxi drivers revived much these days. Agitprop has become an afterthought in American theater, and the issue of labor relations has largely receded from public consciousness. Today, strikes seem to make news more as public nuisances, even the recent one by the transit workers (though the repercussions, including fines, still make headlines).

And yet, coincidentally or not, this season two Broadway revivals, "Awake and Sing!" and "Pajama Game," feature similar calls to arms. The first, a Lincoln Center Theater production at the Belasco, is Odets's turbulent family drama that originally opened in 1935, shortly after the premiere of "Waiting for Lefty."

In "Awake and Sing!" Ralph Berger, the agonized young protagonist (Pablo Schreiber), is torn between love, family obligation and his grandfather's urgent prompting to devote his life to the larger social good. The noble cause wins out. "Spit on your hands and get to work," he says to himself in the last act, vowing to help organize his co-workers to agitate for better treatment. "Maybe we'll fix it so life won't be printed on dollar bills."

The measure of just how established unions had become by the 1950's can be taken at the American Airlines Theater. A strike is merely the decorative background for a swoony romance in the musical "The Pajama Game," which opened on Broadway in 1954. Here, a strike is not a galvanizing implement of social justice but a diverting subplot buttressing the more important questions of when and how the feisty union rep will fall for the hunky factory foreman.

Does irrelevance follow innocuousness? There's no denying that the union movement has been in retreat for the last few decades. For this and other reasons, the calls for collective action in both "Awake and Sing!" and "The Pajama Game" strike audiences today as quaint period markers.

But even if their arrival together on Broadway is just a fluke, it may still signal a reawakening, at least among artists and arts organizations, to the idea that the widening gap between rich and poor poses possible dangers to the country's social fabric. O.K., so the sight of Harry Connick Jr. in pajama bottoms isn't a major political statement, but "Awake and Sing!" did receive another major revival this spring (timed to the centenary of Odets's birth), at Arena Stage in Washington. And Mike Nichols is producing the Off Broadway play "On the Line," about a blue-collar strike in New Jersey.

An experimental revival of "Waiting for Lefty," peopled not by cabdrivers but by disgruntled greeters at Wal-Mart, seems a distinct possibility. Just don't make it a musical, please.