Review: The Time of Your Life
Group Repertory Theatre, 10900 Burbank Bl., North Hollywood, 818-769-PLAY
by Barry Williams
There are a handful of respected stage classics, such as Kaufman and Hart’s The Man Who Came To Dinner, You Can’t Take It With You, and Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, that audiences seem to take great delight in having produced at their local theatres every few years. These plays are timeless, not because they are evocative of a period or era long since past (though this definitely lends the play credence and interest as a so-called period piece), but, more importantly, because they are possessed of sophisticated and well-grounded writing and resplendent characters that seem to transcend time and distance. There is a devil-may-care elan to such plays as Private Lives and The Royal Family that make them extremely sexy and marketable to modern-day audiences. Thus, their revivals are almost always welcome and assured money-makers to regional theatres across the land.
Such is not the case with William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, the play chosen as the kick-off to the Group Repertory Theatre’s 20th Anniversary Season. It is unfortunate that the talents and performances of a fine group of actors fall surprisingly flat, due in part to the weighty and very outmoded speeches that comprise a substantial portion of the evening.
Part of the problem resides in the fact that the play is set in a time that falls between major developments in history, when the country is trying to recover from the morass of mediocre living that Herbert Hoover ably provided the middle and lower classes.
Even now, analysis of 1939 illuminates a quiet, downplayed historical period. Many in the country are still trying to overcome the bleak economic woes of the Great Depression, still underway despite the fact that Hoover has been removed from office six years earlier. FDR and the New Deal are still forging their influence and the dramatic U.S. involvement in the Second World War is just beginning to unfold. For many, placidity and acceptance of one’s station in life seems the only solution. This is the plight of those living in 1939, and, interestingly enough, the very problem that keeps The Time of Your Life in a much less appealing category of play to produce.
The 1939 of The Time of Your Life provides an equally somnolent backdrop. The setting and locale is Nick’s Pacific Street Bar, situated in an area of town that caters to the transient nature of the Bay community, replete with sailors, call girls, trappers, etc. The play is a series of episodic scenes that deftly explore the life situations of the people inhabiting San Francisco at this time. There is poignancy and pathos to this lot, not to mention a little old-fashioned cornball fun. Still, for all its hype and history, this piece comes off, in 1993, as a disjointed and meandering study of the state of the temperament of people living in 1939. Many of the characters are forlorn and without hope, destitute and otherwise shell-shocked into living a life that seems irretrievably without meaning or purpose. Perhaps it was Saroyan’s intent to bring to the stage a piece that accurately reflected the mental and emotional vicissitudes of the day, but, again, it’s a little hard to relate to the concerns of people so far removed from ourselves. Today, as we approach the edge of the millennia, the whole thing rings stodgy and somewhat incoherent, probably not Saroyan’s fault, as the piece must have achieved its purpose and feel at the time it was written.
The play is nobly acted by most of those on stage but there is a prevailing sense of plodding through the evening, as if even the actors realize that this is one dusty war-horse of a script. The direction, by Bert Rosario, is loose and unstructured and needs punching up in a number of places. Too often, actors seem as if they are talking at the audience, instead of to each other, always a deadly trap in a play this old. Finally, the inherent dramatic unfolding just never seems to happen with any sort of import or cadence and everyone on stage seems content to wait far too long until the next speaker picks up the cue. This can often make for a particularly grueling evening of theatre and, at two hours and forty minutes, this production could use some judicious editing and tempo enhancement.
Still, there are some noteworthy turns. At the helm of The Time of Your Life is Group Repertory Theatre’s Artistic Director, Lonny Chapman, who is very familiar with this play, having played one of the central characters on Broadway and being ostensibly a good friend of William Saroyan. Chapman’s work as the central character Joe, the definitive eyes and ears of Nick’s bar, is thoughtful and compelling. His scene with younger acolyte Tom (played with wide-eyed innocence by Skip Parry), in which the two try to see who can chew the most gum, is clearly the funniest moment of the evening. Other fine additions to the cast include Jeff Davis as the Newsboy, Liz Porter as the despondent call girl Kitty Duval, Phillip McKeown as the amiable policeman McCarthy, and Larry Eisenberg as the scruffy and irreverent Kit Carson. These performances make the evening much more engaging than it would have been otherwise. The set design by Malcolm Atterbury, Jr. and Desma Murphy is wonderfully appointed and pleasing to settle into, particularly because it accommodates nicely the many actors who must inhabit it.
The costumes by Marion Wright are dead-on and add the appropriate local color to the evening.
Perhaps the Group Repertory Theatre should rethink its emphasis on such antiquated plays and move towards picking classics of the ilk described above that still soar on the stage and please audiences, despite their age. If a play is emblematic of a specific moment in time, an idea which The Time of Your Life subscribes to, then it is important and vital to bring some sort of contemporary relevancy to a younger audience that may not otherwise appreciate or understand the nuances that the playwright labored to create. The play, poised as it is on the edge of WWII, presents a group of Americans that seem a little too placid and introverted by today’s standards. Thus, it is the director’s responsibility to make us wistful for that which has come before and not that which will come after the play is over.♦