✭✭✭✭✩

by William Saroyan, directed by Albert Schultz

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

July 10-August 11, 2007

Soulpepper’s production of The Time of Your Life is an impressive achievement.  The impressionistic play by Armenian-American William Saroyan (1908-81) surveys a wide range of denizens of a honky-tonk saloon in San Francisco in 1939.  The play is held together not by plot but by the parallels and contrasts of the characters’ hopes and fears.  Saroyan’s preoccupation with the absurdities and contradictions in life pushes the action to the border of the real and the surreal.  It takes a while to get used to the play’s associative structure but once you do the play’s bounteous riches become manifest.

At the centre of the action is Joe, played with a remarkable combination of resignation and levity by Joseph Ziegler.  This mysterious character with unknown sources of wealth revels in the eccentricities he sees around him as he whiles away day after day drinking champagne in an effort “to harm no living being.”  He sends his lovably dim-witted flunky Tom (a very funny Kevin Bundy) on seemingly pointless errands until he conceives a plan to have Tom marry Kitty Duval (Patricia Fagan at her fragile best), the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold.  The first act escalates in its introduction of bizarre characters from an unfunny would-be dancing comedian (the multitalented Jeff Lillico), to a philosophical longshoreman (a believable Stephen Guy-McGrath), until Stuart Hughes bursts on the scene as an hilarious, wild-eyed Kit Carson, whose life is a fabulous concatenation of tall tales.  Derek Boyes presides over all as the level-headed barkeeper Nick while jazz pianist Denzal Sinclaire supplies the life-affirming music that suffuses the atmosphere.

There is not a weak link in the cast of 24, the largest Soulpepper has ever mustered.  Though at present the pace in Act 1 is slacker that it should be, it will undoubtedly tighten up over time.  Director Albert Schultz deftly accomplishes the difficult task of always keeping our focus where it should be even when multiple incidents occur simultaneously.  Lorenzo Savoini’s set perfectly matches the play in depicting a naturalistic world that becomes sketchy around the edges. 

In 1939 when Saroyan wrote the play Europe was already embroiled in World War II while the US looked on at fascism’s growing power.  In the person of the rabid enforcement officer Blick (Michael Simpson), Saroyan shows that evil menaces life and dreams even within the US.  Life is to be lived to the fullest according to the benevolent Joe, but, Saroyan asks in a question still urgent today, how do we live life peacefully when absolutism without and within threatens our freedom?                   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-07-11.

Photo: Stuart Hughes and Joseph Ziegler. ©Sandy Nicholson.