Steven Pasquale takes the director's chair for a fiery revival of ‘Waiting for Lefty’

The veteran stage-and-screen actor is expanding Clifford Odets’s 1935 protest play into a semi-immersive, of-the-moment experience involving music and movement.

Summary

• Actor Steven Pasquale discusses making his directing debut with Waiting for Lefty off Broadway at Classic Stage Company
• The play follows taxi drivers deciding whether to join a labor strike
• Pasquale's production includes music and movement and deals with themes of economic inequality and working-class struggle
• Performances run from October 15 to November 22

“History is told by our leaders, our warriors, and our storytellers, and our leaders are corrupt and our warriors have to report to them,” Steven Pasquale said. “So it’s our job now to document where we’re at, what we are, and hold a mirror up to our society.” This mindset is driving the acclaimed actor to step into the director’s chair for the first time: He's staging an Off-Broadway revival of Clifford Odets’s passionate protest play Waiting for Lefty at Classic Stage Company from October 15 to November 22.

The show follows a group of exploited and exhausted New York City taxi drivers who gather to debate whether to join a massive industry strike while they anxiously await the arrival of their elusive union leader, Lefty Costello. The 1935 drama had an original run time of just 40 minutes, but Pasquale is expanding the piece into an 80-minute production with music and arrangements by Yeller Tooth (Sahar Milani and Cameron Scoggins, who also perform in the show) and movement by Susan Misner. As part of his semi-immersive vision, CSC's venue, which seats audiences on three sides, will be transformed into a tense union hall.

Pasquale’s journey to directing began two years ago with an off-the-cuff comment to CSC’s producing artistic director, Jill Rafson. She encouraged his ambitions, asking him to get coffee and give his pitch, which eventually led to a series of successful readings and a full production offer.

Celebrated as an actor and baritone, Pasquale is known for playing firefighter Sean Garrity in the FX series Rescue Me and Robert Kincaid in Broadway’s Bridges of Madison County musical, earning Drama Desk and Drama League nominations. Following further Broadway performances in Junk and American Son, and a star turn in CSC's 2021 Assassins revival, the seasoned star is taking on his most ambitious challenge yet.

Pasquale sat down with New York Theatre Guide to discuss his shift from acting to directing, his expansion of Waiting for Lefty, and the contemporary political climate that makes Odets's show more urgent than ever.

Get Waiting for Lefty tickets now.

How are you navigating the transition from actor to director?

Well, I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve been in a rehearsal room with the great theatre directors and writers on planet Earth for 29 years. So at a certain point, I just looked in the mirror and I thought, "Well, if I can’t do this, direct a play, having spent so much time with Bartlett Sher and Joe Mantello and John Doyle and Anne Kauffman and Terry Kinney and Alex Timbers..." and the list goes on.

Those are certainly mentors and directors who I have loved working with and respect a lot. It’s funny; they’re all so brilliant, but they bring different strengths to the room. Getting to be an actor, you get to witness all of that. And now making the leap to director hopefully pulls some of the qualities or practices I’ve found so valuable and inspiring as an actor, and leave out some of those that have felt less productive.

What made Waiting for Lefty the right vehicle for your directorial debut?

We’re at an inflection point in the country. This is not sustainable, this level of corruption and wrongdoing before our very eyes every day. I’ve been looking for really political work because as a storyteller, it’s falling to our community to genuinely reflect who we are right now, and it’s not good.

In addition to that, I had the great good fortune in the last handful of years to work on Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins and Ayad Akhtar’s Junk and Chris Demos-Brown’s American Son and Billy Ray’s The Comey Rule. I’ve had this enormous experience in the last handful of jobs that felt like I was working on things that were really saying something. I wanted that with my directorial debut.

How did you decide to expand the 40-minute play into an 80-minute one?

Waiting for Lefty is a very short play. It’s a 30-page evening, so usually it’s paired with another one-act. The problem with that is Waiting for Lefty is so fucking good that the other thing ends up paling in comparison, so I wanted to honor the Waiting for Lefty part of it as a whole evening.

We’re building it out with a whole bunch of old rearranged labor music and a notion of protest and even some movement. It’s going to feel very multidisciplinary. It’s going to be a quilt of an event of which Lefty is, of course, the largest and most important patch, but not the entire quilt.

How will turning the venue into a union hall shape the audience experience?

What we’re attempting to do is to start the evening so the audience feels like they’re perhaps only going to witness a simple reading. And then by the time we get to the end of the play, if we get it right, the audience will feel like the stakes are high, it’s life or death, and they’re really there in a union hall. The idea of creating something from nothing is an important tenet that I’m attempting with this production. It’s very bespoke and handmade.

What does Yeller Tooth's score add to the production?

I was very specific about wanting something that we like to describe as trashcan-fire music. Music you would really hear down at the docks in a real working-class kind of way: guitar, banjo, violin, singing. It’s got a great Americana, swamp-rat quality to it, which feels very right for the play.

What has been the biggest surprise about directing?

All the homework. I mean, I’ve been an actor my entire life. First of all, I like to show up totally prepared, and then I just sit there until you need me and then I do my thing and then I go away until you need me again. That’s fun. The constant problem solving, scheduling, putting out fires is not my strong suit. That’s the part of it that has hit me by surprise. But once I’m in the rehearsal room with tape on the floor, that’s my favorite place on planet Earth.

Waiting For Lefty deals with labor and economic inequality. What specifically about those themes is your production exploring?

One of the things I want to talk about with this play is what I call the threshold. I want everyone I know to make a million dollars. But that’s actually not the problem. It’s the oligarchal class of staggeringly wealthy, hyper-powerful individuals who have way too much control over our lives.

People struggle to differentiate between millionaires and billionaires and trillionaires we’ve seen emerge recently. Take Jalen Brunson making $38 million a year playing for the Knicks; that’s deserved, free-market money. But to touch Elon Musk’s wealth at that salary, he’d have to play 26,000 seasons. We have no concept of this tiny group’s power, and it’s unacceptable.

Odets wrote about working-class exhaustion nearly a century ago. How does that theme resonate in this play today?

Well, we’re asking the same damn questions today that we were asking in 1935. For example, how does it seem like 10 guys have and control and own everything and get to have that much power and sway over American life? And we’re there again. We are looking at levels of inequality and oligarchy that dwarf the time of Rockefeller and Vanderbilt and JP Morgan.

One of the reasons the play is so powerful is, look, there’s only one clearly observable majority anywhere in the world, and it’s working people. And worker’s rights, to me, is maybe the way out of [...] corruption, self-dealing, and criminality.

Get Waiting for Lefty tickets now.

Photo credit: Steven Pasquale. (Photo by JJ Geiger)