Word: playes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Whenever a play is revived, it is rewritten, to some extent, by its new audience. What was once vivid may now appear dim. What passed for honest emotion may now be disdained as gluey sentimentality. Each successive age accords authority only to its own brand of vision and sophistication...
...these things have happened to William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, first performed 30 years ago and currently revived with care, affection and excellence by Director John Hirsch and the Lincoln Center Repertory Company. In the context of 1969, the play has been transformed in several fascinating ways. What baffled audiences in 1939 is quite clear now. In retrospect, The Time of Your Life is revealed as a kind of prophecy, as well as play, prefiguring changing dramatic trends and the skeptical questioning of American values...
Saroyan was the U.S. father of the unmade play. The Time of Your Life was not carpentered but spilled out within the boozy confines of a San Francisco waterfront bar. It is a combination of mood music and action painting. In 1939, this was as disconcerting and puzzling to playgoers as Harold Pinter's plays have proved to be to more recent theater audiences...
...Paris theater currently has two-and only two-real hits. One of them, Hair, is in its 24th week. The other, which just opened, is Jean Anouilh's Cher Antoine. Any play by France's most widely performed modern playwright is bound to be bitingly witty and polished to a high gloss; this one, Anouilh's 28th, is even more so, and the critics were unreservedly delighted...
Their complaints, tender memories and snide remarks about the deceased evoke the contradictory aspects of Antoine's character. In the second act he materializes onstage, rehearsing a group of actors in his last play. To be performed for himself alone, it is about how his relatives and friends will react to his death. In the play-within-the-play (a favorite Anouilh device), the characters and their lines are identical with those of the first act but enriched by Antoine's commenting presence...