Word: saroyans
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...Cave Dwellers (by William Saroyan) are broken-down performers camping out in a crumbling, abandoned East Side theater. A done-for boxer, a beat old clown, an ailing old actress are joined by a sweet young girl and a man with a trained bear and a wife who gives birth to a baby. By day they lie abed, or street-beg, or in desperation steal milk. By night they act out their old roles, philosophize, soliloquize, dramatize the day's rebuffs, fall asleep and dream...
With his first Broadway play in 14 years, Saroyan is clearly back at the same old stand, making the same old pitch−but without his onetime showmanship. He was often soupy and boozy about the down-at-heel in the old days; but at his best, as in The Time of Your Life, he had an alcoholic gaiety and verve, and a real knack for brewing instant-vaudeville. The poet in him might slump or the philosopher babble, but the prankster sufficiently triumphed...
...Cave Dwellers, Saroyan is no longer a high-spirited toastmaster to waif-dom, but its long-winded poet laureate. There are the usual variety turns, but not much seems cockeyed or even imaginative. There are sad-eyed little gallantries instead; and even when Saroyan half-mocks at stage doings, he seems half-mawkish. His people are not just too good to be true, but mostly too good to be interesting. Their one message is love, love for one another; all is love, the secret of the theater is love, even hate is love. All this, however devoutly to be wished...
Theatrically, it would not matter if Saroyan wrote first with an eraser−to wipe out reality−if afterwards, with a pen, he created magic. But this play has little magic: only a stab of pathos, now and then, in a wilderness of plight; or a flash of color, humor, poetry amid constant murmuration...
...sandwiches and ketchup," frail (5 ft. 4 in., about 95 Ibs.) Joe Gould sold (for a drink) entertainment (lectures, poetry recitals, epithets) to any willing bar patron. Gould had no known relatives but many friends, including Poet E. E. Cummings, Artist Don Freeman, Writers Malcolm Cowley and William Saroyan...