Barroom Days

Shakespeare Theatre has ‘The Time of Your Life.’

By: Stuart Duncan

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From left: Ned Noyes as Tom, loyal friend to Joe (Andrew Weems), in The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s production of The Time of Your Life.


   Let’s have a long, warm round of applause for The Shakespeare Theatre in Madison. Right on the heels of a production of Eugene Ionesco’s seldom-seen absurdist play, The Bald Soprano, comes an even more rarely performed classic — William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life.
   It’s rather startling that Saroyan is so forgotten these days. The Time of Your Life was written and debuted on Broadway in 1939 and won both the Pulitzer and the New York Drama Critics’ Award that year (the first to do so). The following year Saroyan wrote a huge hit novel, My Name Is Aram, and in 1942 followed those up with a novel and a movie, The Human Comedy, for which he won a script-writing Oscar. And then he faded from view, at least in part because he turned down the Pulitzer. (His excuse was that he didn’t believe that "commerce should ever judge art." He accepted the Drama Critics’ Award. That was "art judging art.")
   The Time of Your Life is set in a Pacific Street saloon in San Francisco, just on the edge of the Tenderloin in the year 1939 — an October day into the night. Bars have been favorite sites for writers hoping to dispense a little philosophy with their characters: W.H. Auden’s Age of AnxietyThe Iceman ComethPicasso in the Lapine Agile come to mind.
   Here we meet Nick, the owner of the bar (played by Gregory Derelian) and a few of the habitual denizens of the one-floor-down establishment. There is Joe (a wonderful performance by Andrew Weems), who sits in some imagined splendor, drinking champagne (and thereby forcing Nick to stock it) and dropping hints of the secrets of life along with instructions on how to keep him happy; an Arab (Paul Meshejian) who sits quietly in the corner at the last stool, muttering about the lack of a solid foundation in the state "all down the line"; Tom (Ned Noyes), Joe’s gofer, apparently content to trade his dreams of the future for a kind word and a few bucks in the present; and Kitty Duval (Sofia Jean Gomez), who may or may not have been in burlesque, but most certainly now has joined an even older profession.
   We will meet many others (it’s a company of 21) in the 130 minutes we spend with Nick and Joe. More importantly we will hear the playwright’s view of life. A bar, you see, invites honesty and perhaps even a touch of the truth.
   Saroyan at one point wrote to a young, aspiring writer and gave him this advice: "Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat. And when you sleep, really sleep. Try as well as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell."
   Here, Joe embodies this and perhaps a bit more. We will soon meet two additional characters who will affect our tale. One is Blick (Christopher Burns), an undercover cop with a twisted mission who gets his due in a somewhat unsatisfying off-stage street altercation. The other is Kit Carson (the veteran Edmond Genest in his finest role in years), a grizzled old moocher with stories from every decade and every state.
   When the show first opened (almost 70 years ago) one critic tried to tell us what the show was about: "gleeful and heart-breaking; tender and hilarious; probing and elusive." Well, it’s all of those and perhaps a bit more. How about disarming and deceiving? You can certainly make up your own. But you will so infrequently get the opportunity to see the show at all, don’t miss it this time. Paul Mullins (the director who also took on King John and turned it into a huge triumph) has cast it superbly, found great rhythms in the dialogue and explored the silences with intelligence. Above all, he has kept the sense of humor that threads its way throughout.
The Time of Your Life continues at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, 36 Madison Ave., Drew University, Madison, through Sept. 30. Performances: Tues. 7:30 p.m., Wed.-Fri. 8 p.m., Sat. 2, 8 p.m., Sun. 2, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $28-$52; (973) 408-5600.