Word: saroyans
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...Time of Your Life (by William Saroyan) remains, after some 16 years, the most engaging of Saroyan's plays. Revived at the City Center, it suffers less from the ravages of time than from the unsociableness of space: in that vast hall, the play's intimate, childlike mood never quite lassoes the audience. But what was always brightest about the play-its procession of cockeyed characters through the swinging doors of a waterfront dive- still has considerable lure. Its old Kit Carsonish liar, whose opening gun is "I don't suppose you ever fell in love with...
Excellent at conveying a slightly alcoholic gaiety in people, Saroyan is far less persuasive about the all-abounding goodness in life. When his honky-tonk's lights dim to a prettier glow, when his wealthy drunk plays both God and Maecenas to prostitutes and bums, when the only bad man in the play is obligingly bumped off, there circulates a too-starry-eyed-or merely glassy-eyed-optimism...
...poet in Saroyan, unlike the prankster in him, lacks the power to override the facts of life. There is something beguiling about Saroyan's fantasies, but soft-bellied about his truths...
Lieberson's answer: new gimmicks, such as The Confederacy album. Among Lieberson's other off-beat projects: Edward R. Murrow's I Can Hear It Now album of historic speeches, the prestigious Literary Series, with such authors as Somerset Maugham and William Saroyan reading from their "own works, and album revivals of old musicals (the Pal Joey and Porgy and Bess albums have, in turn, sparked Broadway revivals...
Sweet Thursday is a turkey with visibly Saroyanesque stuffings. But where Saroyan might have clothed the book's characters and incidents with comic reality, Steinbeck merely comic-strips them of all reality and even of very much interest...