Word: saroyans
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...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...
...milieu is virtually the message, and Playwright Charles Gordone knows it like the black of his hand. The setting is a small West Village bar. If one imagines a corrosively militant Saroyan writing a play called The Time of Your Death, the atmospherics of the place will be grasped immediately. But "Johnny's Bar" is no oasis for gentle daydreamers. It is a foxhole of the color war-full of venomous nightmares, thwarted aspirations and trigger-quick tempers, a place where the napalm of hurt has seared each man's skin. The jukebox rumbles with hard rock...
...WILLIAM SAROYAN...
...Scott Fitzgerald, who revered him, "a rummy and a liar with the inbred talent of a dishonest and easily frightened angel." Thomas Wolfe he rated as "a one-book glandular giant with the guts of three mice." Once he provoked a fight in a hotel dining room with William Saroyan, and when the poet Wallace Stevens, 20 years his senior, visited him on Key West, he left with a rather mysterious black eye. All things being equal, William Faulkner got off lightly: he was merely nicknamed "Old Corndrinking Mellifluous...
...Saroyan's version of boy meets girl seems sticky, but this production directed by Michael Cline could have given more insights into the characters as three-dimensional people. At least Saroyan makes the point that provincial Texas towns are best gotten out of before sundown...