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- The Time of Your Life
-
-
- (November 6, 1939)
-
- Out of a warm heart and a lively fancy William Saroyan has
- written a paean in The Time of Your Life to the essential
- goodness in life and people, a chant of love for the scorned &
- rejected. He has filled a San Francisco waterfront dive with
- prostitutes, sailors,cops, bums, drunks, slot-machine addicts,
- hoofers, young men in love, old men in rags. Some of these
- people are as touching as his battered Arab who plays an
- ancient, mournful wail upon a harmonica. Some are as
- uproariously funny as his prodigious, W.C.Fieldsy liar (Len
- Doyle) who bursts on the stage with: "I don't suppose you ever
- fell in love with a midget weighing 39 pounds?" All are forlorn.
- But by means of a wealthy drunk (Eddie Dowling) with a generous
- purse Saroyan gives back to these people some of their hopes &
- dreams, something of their dignity.
-
- Says Saroyan: Cops have hearts and streetwalkers souls; it is
- interference, institutions, authority that degrade humanity. And
- in a gush of feeling, he preaches a benevolent anarchy of
- live-&-let live. That feeling gives his play warmth, faith, also
- a measure of falseness. For to exorcise evil and unhappiness,
- Saroyan has to make the world cock-eyed and alcoholic, and all
- its outcasts childlike and starry-eyed. His mushy idealism turns
- his play with its god from the slot machine, into a fairy tale,
- Saroyan takes the bread & butter of existence and smears it with
- a lot of jam.
-
-