Word: saroyaned
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Lanford Wilson, 37, clearly hopes to be a dramatist of this latter school, but at present he lacks the specific gravity for it. He is more akin to the Saroyan who wrote lines like "I don't suppose you ever fell in love with a midget weighing 39 pounds?" He is also prey to Saroyan's easy sentimentality and that boozy euphoria that permits Saroyan's characters to bite on the nail of life and declare it to be a nougat...
...dropped from the façade of the Hotel Baltimore, and the wreckers' ball awaits this seedy relic of past elegance. The lobby is a kind of limbo where the remaining tenants relate or display their past falls from grace. In The Time of Your Life, Saroyan gave us one whore with a heart of gold, the luminous Kitty Duval. Wilson is no piker. He gives us three: Martha (Trish Hawkins), April (Conchata Ferrell) and Suzy (Stephanie Gordon). Martha is a lost, innocent child, April her caustic Eve Arden-type sidekick, and Suzy the dumb one. It testifies...
With virtually no plot line, these characters must carry the burden of Wilson's meaning, again more succinctly stated by Saroyan: "No foundation. All the way down the line." The same might be said for much of Wilson's play; it is most fascinating as a symptom. Why do U.S. playwrights and audiences regard derelicts as exotic romantics? Why should the dregs of society be regarded as the ultimate repositories of its wisdom? Why is a kinky personality presumed to be a rich one? And finally, how much of theatergoing has become a jaded form of slumming...
Welles is the star, but the walk-on players-from Saroyan to Stravinsky, Hepburn to Hemingway, Cocteau to Kazan-are not bad. Houseman invites the reader to an opening-night party of the cultivated mind, and he is the perfect host. · T.E. Kalem
...wistful, slightly sentimental humor of William Saroyan and the abrasive machine-gun ribaldry of Lenny Bruce. Add to that a mental image of Holden Caulfield as a 30-year-old dropout, and you have the basic tone and temper of Terrence McNally's Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone...