Word: play
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Saroyan; produced by the Theatre Guild Inc. in association with Eddie Dowling). Last season Short-Story Writer William Saroyan made his bow as a playwright with a long, whimsical one-acter, My Heart's in the Highlands, drew praise from many critics. Last week, with his first full-length play, Saroyan had most of the critics throwing their hats in the air. They were willing to forgive The Time of Your Life its lack of form and dearth of plot because of its "poignant beauty," "high quality of imagination," "ever-warming tenderness...
More truly a play and a much better one than My Heart's in the Highlands, The Time of Your Life unquestionably is. Out of a warm heart and a lively fancy Saroyan has written a paean to the essential goodness in life and people, a chant of love for the scorned & rejected. He has filled a San Francisco waterfront dive with prostitutes, sailors, cops, bums, drunks, slot-machine addicts, hoofers, young men in love, old men in rags. Some of these people are as touching as his battered Arab who plays an ancient, mournful wail upon a harmonica. Some...
Says Saroyan: Cops have hearts and streetwalkers souls; it is interference, institutions, authority that degrade humanity. And in a gush of feeling, he preaches a benevolent anarchy of live-&-let-live. That feeling gives his play warmth, faith, also a measure of falseness. For to exorcise evil and unhappiness, Saroyan has to make the world cockeyed and alcoholic, and all its outcasts childlike and starry-eyed. His mushy idealism turns his play, with its god from the slot machine, into a fairy tale. Saroyan takes the bread & butter of existence and smears it with...
...never misses football practice, belittles his own talents, bends over backward to praise his teammates. After he scored all 27 points in the Iowa game three weeks ago, he said: "Anybody could have done it with that Evashevski [200-pounder who once said he didn't want to-play football if he couldn't "crack 'em"] and those others in there blocking like that. They don't make them any better than that Evashevski...
...Feeblest is Chicago. Once - in the star-spangled days of Amos Alonzo Stagg - the Maroons shared honors with Michigan as the top team in the Midwest. But in the last decade, under the regime of President Robert M. Hutchins, football has been de-emphasized, its teams play like scrubs (154 points have been scored against them in four games this season) and its alumni bow their heads on Saturday nights. "We are a big joke in the eyes of the American public," wailed the student Daily Maroon last week...