Any theater that produces "Waiting for Lefty" today isn't just tackling the play. It's also tackling the legacy of one of the most exciting opening nights in American theater.

The year was 1935, in the thick of the Great Depression. The locale was the Civic Repertory Theatre in New York City. The occasion was a benefit for a leftist arts periodical, New Theatre Magazine.

The actors were members of the Group Theatre, including future movie star John Garfield and future superstar director Elia Kazan. The script: a pastiche of scenes about people in various walks of life, struggling with money, love, morality and labor strife in hard times. It was the first produced work by the eager young playwright Clifford Odets.

Less than two minutes into the first scene of "Waiting for Lefty," recalled Group co-founder Harold Clurman in his memoir, "The Fervent Years," a "shock of delighted recognition struck the audience like a tidal wave.

"Deep laughter, hot assent, a kind of joyous fervor seemed to sweep the audience toward the stage. ... Audience and actors had become as one. Line after line brought applause, whistles, bravos and heartfelt shouts of kinship."

And at the play's end, when oppressed cab drivers are asked if their union should stage a protest, Clurman noted that the audience answered with "a spontaneous roar of 'Strike! Strike!' "

Theater preview "Waiting for Lefty," opens Thursday, runs through Feb. 12, Capitol Hill Arts Center, 1621 12th Ave., Seattle; $15-$18 (800-838-3006 or www.capitolhillarts.com).

Sheila Daniels, the veteran Seattle director whose new staging of "Waiting for Lefty" opens next week at Capitol Hill Arts Center (CHAC), is well aware of that tumultuous initial reaction to the play. And she knows that today the response is bound to be different.

But Daniels believes the time is ripe to revisit this activist work, seen most often now in college productions.

Even though the script's pungent '30s slang can seem dated, and its political passions are out of joint with our cooler, more skeptical time (some of the Group members were Communist Party members during that era), Daniels ranks "Lefty" high "on my all-time top 10 list of plays."

"Most taxi drivers don't even have unions anymore in America, and a lot of other things are different," agrees the director. "But when I re-read the script, it just felt like we hadn't changed that much. The characters are dealing with money problems, broken marriages, health care. I'm from Oregon, and I've been watching the impact of our own recession on my friends in and around Corvallis, which was very hard hit. And they're dealing with a lot of the same things."

In her 13-actor production for CHAC, Daniels is taking advantage of the Capitol Hill fringe theater's flexible staging options and its penchant for older works of social and political protest (Brecht's "Arturo Ui," Ionesco's "Rhinoceros," the forthcoming "Death of a Salesman" by Arthur Miller).

"We're doing 'Lefty' in the round, because I wanted to have as many people close to the action as possible," Daniels explains. "The actors are doing the music themselves with voices, guitars, percussion on found objects. The score is made up of 1930s tunes, political and sentimental-romantic, like 'Pennies From Heaven' and 'It's Only a Paper Moon.' "

Can the play's message of people fighting economic oppression by union action resonate as much today with CHAC's youngish, largely nonunionized audience? "The play isn't pro union leadership so much as pro worker," she responds. "This isn't a good union, but a corrupt one. I mean, the union boss has a gunman! But the workers still need to come together and fight."

Daniels is instructing her actors "not to play the ideas, but play the people. And remember how desperate they really are — and yet also, in their moments of resistance to the system, there's a kind of fierce joy."

The director admits she's had to overcome some of her own qualms to revisit the play.

"I've had to ask myself, 'Is this just preaching to the choir?' And I've realized, yes, yes, it may be doing that. But the chorus needs lifting up sometimes. And I hope the show can help put some vigor back into the idea of working together to make a change."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com