Toronto Star, Canada
July 5 2007
Saroyan poses a question for our times
But 1939’s The Time of Your Life is also a modern call to live life,
not question its purpose
Jul 05, 2007 04:30 AM
Richard Ouzounian
THEATRE CRITIC
Is the glass of life half full or half empty?
That’s a question playwrights have been asking, from Sophocles
through Samuel Beckett, but no one has ever posed it with quite the
edge that William Saroyan did.
The young Armenian-American from Fresno, Calif., wrote a script in
1939 called The Time of Your Life, which has been produced ever since
to a chorus of response that either hails it for its optimism or
derides it for its pessimism.
The truth is actually somewhere in between, and that’s what Albert
Schultz wants to explore in his Soulpepper Theatre production,
opening Tuesday.
Schultz had admired the play for years, but it wasn’t until he saw
Tina Landau’s acclaimed production at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre
in 2002 that he felt the need to bring it to the stage himself one
day.
On the surface, Saroyan wrote a loose-limbed exploration of a bunch
of characters who lounged around a saloon in San Francisco on a fall
day in 1939.
We’ve got a philosopher, a braggart, a prostitute with a heart of
gold, a dancer with dreams of glory, a corrupt villain and a mythical
hero who wants to make things right.
They all sit and wait for life to happen. For Saroyan, it was a
microcosm of what was going on in America. Hitler had invaded Poland
nearly two months before, but the country he lived in was motionless,
unable to decide what to do.
No wonder that a solitary Arab, holding up one end of the bar, keeps
intoning his mantra: "No foundation, all the way down the line."
"Saroyan knew his country was asleep," says Schultz, "and he wanted
to wake it up. He knew that evil was just around the corner and he
wanted people to do something about it. His biggest concern is how we
appreciate and use the time that we have on this planet. He begins
his prologue by saying, `In the time of your life, live – so that in
that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or
for any life your life touches.’"
The gentle optimism is what most people remember most about Saroyan’s
work, but Schultz reminds us that there is another admonition in that
initial statement as well.
"Saroyan goes on to tell us, `Have no shame in being kindly and
gentle but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill
and have no regret,’" says Schultz.
In a post-9/11 world, such thoughts acquire a new edge. "Are we
talking about the Taliban?" asks Schultz. "Is Saroyan giving us a
license for revenge? Or merely for self-defence? You have to look at
the play to discover that."
You also have to look at two other plays, one of them also in
Soulpepper’s repertory. Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, received the
Pulitzer Prize one year before The Time of Your Life did. It, too,
was a loosely structured script that broke the rules of contemporary
dramaturgy and demanded we examine the world as we lived it: day by
day, minute by minute.
The other script was Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, also written
in 1939, which put a disparate assortment of characters in a tavern
and let them examine the nature of human dreams.
If Wilder’s vision is (despite its third act darkness) perhaps a
touch on the sweet side (with all those ice cream sodas) then
O’Neill’s is certainly bleaker, full of rotgut whisky, endless
hangovers and mornings made out of nothing but despair.
It falls to Saroyan, then, to tread the middle path, where the glass
simply contains water and is neither half full nor half empty, but
offers us this message: "In the time of your life, live – so that in
that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the
world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it."
Is that the message we need to hear in 2007? Albert Schultz thinks so
and William Saroyan would probably agree.
le/232497
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress