Word: saroyans
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Magic (by G. K. Chesterton) and Hello, Out There (by William Saroyan) provide a double bill that prompts a single verdict. Both playwrights are much better at dialogue than drama. Saroyan's one-acter is more rewarding because it's simpler and more human. It tells of a guy (Eddie Dowling) in a small-town Texas jail who, before he is killed by a mob, talks through the bars of his cell with the jail's wispish slavey of a cook (Julie Haydon). Theirs is a brief rapprochement, a doomed romance, of two desperately lonely, anonymous souls...
However blithe about box office, Broadway has its fears about manpower. Though it has lost fewer big names to the armed services than Hollywood, gone or going are Playwrights Sidney Kingsley (Dead End), Thornton Wilder (Our Town), William Saroyan, Jerome Chodorov (My Sister Eileen), Irwin Shaw (Bury the Dead); Actors Maurice Evans, Burgess Meredith, Lee J. Cobb; top Scene Designers Jo Mielziner, Donald Oenslager. Worse, Actors' Equity has been drained of a good fourth of its male rank & file. Casting takes longer and has to be warier: many an actor still here today may be gone tomorrow. Most available...
Thirty-three-year-old Playwright William Saroyan got $60,000 from M.G.M. for his modestly titled Human Comedy, promptly distributed most of it among his innumerable Armenian relatives-whom he had claimed in his draft application as dependents. Result: his dependents ceased to be dependents, and Saroyan was reclassified by his San Francisco draft board as "potential 1-A." The playwright asked deferment in order to carry through with a serial production, beginning this month, of 20 Saroyan plays. Said he: "We have a terrific program outlined. If I were drafted or given a commission to do writing it couldn...
Jason, the ivory tower aesthete, has married a girl named Lisa. Actually the daughter of a Southern mill-hand, she poses as an aristocrat from Virginia. Into their marriage comes Mike Ambler, a reasonably accurate facsimile of William Saroyan, whose new play is about to open on Broadway. Ambler takes a fancy to Pason, tears down his reserves, and just as the critic is becoming stale, brings out the human qualities in him. But Ambler also falls in love with Lisa. The night of the opening of Mike's play the crisis comes: Lisa prepares to run off with Mike...
...Saroyan's prefaces are not by any means he glittering mirror-mazes in which Shaw shows off his plays, but he delivers limself of some nobly arrogant lines...