The Theatre: New Play in Manhattan: Nov. 6, 1939

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The Time of Your Life (by William Saroyan; produced by the Theatre Guild Inc. in association with Eddie Dowling). Last season Short-Story Writer William Saroyan made his bow as a playwright with a long, whimsical one-acter, My Heart's in the Highlands, drew praise from many critics. Last week, with his first full-length play, Saroyan had most of the critics throwing their hats in the air. They were willing to forgive The Time of Your Life its lack of form and dearth of plot because of its "poignant beauty," "high quality of imagination," "ever-warming tenderness."

More truly a play and a much better one than My Heart's in the Highlands, The Time of Your Life unquestionably is. Out of a warm heart and a lively fancy Saroyan has written a paean 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 cockeyed 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.