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By last week Waiting for Lefty had been banned in seven cities on one ambiguous pretext or another. In Boston the police ran the New Theatre Players out of two houses, finally locked up four actors on charges of "profanity and blasphemy." After winning the George Pierce Baker Cup at the Yale Drama School for its performance of the play, the Unity Players were forbidden in future to act Waiting for Lefty anywhere in New Haven. It took a concerted move by University liberals to smash the ban. When the Collective Theatre tried to put on Waiting for Lefty in Newark, the troupe was ousted from a school building, then moved to a hall which was promptly condemned by the Building Department, finally went to another hall where nine introductory speakers were successively arrested. In Hollywood the New Theatre Group was presenting Waiting for Lefty together with Odets' anti-Nazi Till the Day I Die when the director was kidnapped, badly beaten by thugs.
This systematic campaign against a play acknowledged as high art regardless of its political significance reached such nation-wide proportions last week that the strictly nonradical Authors' League of America was moved to come to the defense of the harassed New Theatre League. Declared Vice President Elmer Davis (History of the New York Times, Friends of Mr. Sweeney) of the Authors' League: "The tactics employed to suppress presentation of Waiting for Lefty are familiar and timeworn. Technicalities of the fire laws, obsolete statutes from the old 'blue laws' period, red tape in connection with licenses —all of these are used to bar the play from theatres or to stop performances. But the real issue of freedom of opinion and the right to express it is clearly the crux of the matter. Not only those who are concerned with the theatre but everyone who wants to preserve the American heritage of civil liberties will bitterly resent this arbitrary suppression of a play which has been widely acclaimed."
*The Manhattan theatre season just ending produced an unparalleled number of social justice dramas, including: Odets' Awake and Sing!, Elmer Rice's Judgment Day and Between Two Worlds, the Theatre Guild's Rain From Heaven, the Theatre Union's Stevedore, Sailors of Cattaro, Black Pit.