you Are your school days out of sight? When you took English, art, and math. What's your favorite Fahrenheit? How sour are the grapes of wrath? Do you need a challenger? Poor disgusting Salinger. Do you love the written word? What happened to the mocking? our show is just beginning so find a place to sit these questions will be on the test it's time for sophomore
Welcome back to Sophomore Lit, where we reread your 10th grade reading list. I'm John McCoy, and with me is returning co-host Phil Gonzalez. Hey, Phil. Hello, John. Hey, it's been a while. Yeah. You want to reintroduce yourself to everyone out there? My name is Phil Gonzalez. I am a podcaster with a couple of shows. One is called Deep in Bear Country, a Berenstain Bearcast, where I talk about the books of the Berenstain Bears. And my other podcast is called It's Del Toro Time.
not only Guillermo del Toro related, we also discuss the movies that influence the career of del Toro and just a bunch of other horror stuff that we like to get our fingers into. Yes, and many lifetimes ago, Phil and I... Did a podcast together called Click a Cast, which was on the books of Beverly Clary. It took a lot longer to get through than we thought it was going to. That's just the way everything is.
This time we are doing William Soroyan's 1939 play, The Time of Your Life. This was my choice. But I'm curious, you seem to know the play pretty well, and I was wondering what your history with the play is. Okay, so... this play the time of your life is was a seminal like turning point in my life as a as a as a theater person because my freshman year in high school uh
just to bore you to death in texas there's an organization called uil universal interscholastic league it's the like the most important thing in high schools in texas and they are an organization that awards points to various everything you can do in high school from football games to chess matches they award points and at the end of the year the school with the highest of points wins uil and one of the events that scores the highest amount of points for uil is the is the
Yearly one act competition. So my freshman year, our one act was William Soroyan's The Time of Your Life. It was my theater teacher's favorite play. He had been waiting his entire career to direct this. It was. To give you an idea of what this was like, you had to cut a play down to like 45 to 50 minutes. And the entire set had to be set up and torn down in 10 minutes time.
in order in order to work and we had a we had a working pinball machine we had a an era specific working wurlitzer jukebox playing actual 78s of the missouri waltz we had a working beer tap on stage we had a stage we had a real piano We went full out. Then we were disqualified.
What? Before the first competition, because an anonymous letter was written to the UIL board in Texas saying that we broke a rule, which we didn't, but you can't prove a negative. And our teacher could never prove that we never got outside help on the show. The show was canceled after all the work. We had period specific costumes, tailor made for the characters, everything. It was a solid high school production of William Soroyan's The Time of Your Life.
However, we had worked on this play for literally months doing book work, text work, character work, physical work, just delving into the history. By the end of my freshman year in high school. And I may have mentioned this before. I knew we knew the history of the group theater. We had read The Fervent Years. We knew Soroyan. We knew Clifford Odette's like those.
Those playwrights were just like old family members to us by that point. But the time of your life stood. And that was the beginning of the end for my theater teacher like that. anonymous letter basically broke his mind and he was fired a couple of years later but he was never the same after the the dismantling of of the time of your life it was also the first major role i ever got cast in my freshman year in high school and i played
Tom, the most difficult character ever written for the American stage. The most underwritten character in the entire play. The Enigma handed to a 14 year old and told figure out this guy. Wow. Wow. So, yeah. Well, so your story amazes me and shocks me, but it also. is going to contradict what I'm going to say here, which is William Soroyan is...
a largely forgotten character these days. You know, it's fascinating to me that you in high school got to know him and got to know the milieu he worked in. My background with this play is... In high school, I read William Soroyan's novel, The Human Comedy, which of all of his works is the one I think sort of survives because it gets taught in middle schools and stuff. Even though, isn't it? Isn't it?
literally a novelization of his screenplay like didn't he sell the screenplay and was upset with what they were doing with it so he he re he wrote it as a novel like i think of it as like the great novelization of the human comedy sure sure i mean I mean, well, that's a whole other story. Sometimes we can talk about Soroyan and Hemingway and Faulkner in Hollywood and the...
All the craziness that mid-century modernists got up to in the 30s and 40s. So I liked the book, The Human Comedy. And after that, I had picked up at a yard sale somewhere. A paperback book called Great American Plays, the 1930s, which sounds just as exciting as it is. But you have to understand that in those days, those. long ago days before the internet, you kind of had to find your culture. You know, you had to go out and actively seek culture. I was interested in theater, but I had no...
particular input for it. I would go to my college library and look at the, there was a series, The Great Plays of X Year. And it would have like a book that would have. Little abbreviated versions of like whatever they picked. Yeah, it had like summaries and like the original cast list and stuff.
It was sort of like the Reader's Digest version. And the other thing that it had was it had all the Al Hirschfeld caricatures. That was why you checked those out from the library for the Hirschfeld section.
I never read any of the other plays of the 1930s, and I'm sorry to whomever else is in that paperback edition, but I did read... the time of your life and I remember at the time that it had a strong effect on me and when I was thinking about books to do on this podcast because let's face it I've done all the low-hanging fruit now. I've done all your
Catchers in the Rise, all your Kill on Mockingbirds. And unless I'm going to go back and revisit some of those things, I need to find some of the Ulcerans of the American. literary scene and i thought well whatever what about that play yeah what about that play was it as weird as i remember it yeah it was Was it as ineffable as it seemed to me in high school? It certainly is that ineffable. It certainly is. I got to say, though, as a 14-year-old, I wasn't quite...
experienced enough in the world. I wasn't quite hip to the to the to the workings of the human mind or hip to the human condition to. grasp really what was going on in this play. I really liked the play. I thought it's one of those plays that you have to keep reminding yourself is a comedy. It's very funny if performed well, but... As a kid, I didn't it didn't hit me that it wasn't supposed to be.
You know, a three act drama with a beginning and a middle and an end. There's only one or two characters who have a beginning and a middle and an end. Everyone else just kind of is this is just a. day or so in their life and then it ends well this is being written at exactly the same time that tennessee williams is coming up in the world and um And it's so completely different from that kind of extreme close family drama, even Eugene O'Neill.
You know, in the 70s, there was a whole genre of films out there. There were these films that took place over the course of a day. had enormous casts and you kind of watch the day unfold in real time. Things like American Graffiti, things like Car Wash, even all of the Irwin Allen. Disaster movies were like that. They would bring together these huge casts. It was an excuse to get just a bunch of actors together and follow them for 24 hours. And this play...
is very much like that. It unfolds in real time in a public space, Nick's Bar in San Francisco, and follows literally something like three dozen named characters. Yeah. Of which, to be fair, probably 10 or so have... substantial parts in the play. You know, I was kind of thinking, well, why don't people do that kind of thing anymore? And reading this through, I get some of the feeling for why you might not want to do that. It's a huge cast.
It's a three plus hour long play as well. Most productions trim it a little bit or they mix it up a little bit. There was a really famous production that was done in the early 2000s. that sort of remixed a lot of the monologues and everything. So they overlapped a bit more. So there was a little more action on stage. But yeah, one of the things I read is that they talked about.
The director of that production, Tina Landau, wrote a thing on it, and she said that in the 20s and 30s, the three artistic movements that inspired this play were vaudeville... which is evident in the way the whole structure is like a series of turns. You're watching kind of almost skits. Jazz, obviously, the Freeform... flowing of the storyline. And then murals, mural art, how Soroyan was trying to create a just a street scene.
but interior street scene of life in this part of San Francisco, just sort of in a static shot. If you step back and look at it, you're like, wow, there's humanity writ large right there in front of me.
and sort of blending those three concepts together. Also, you got to remember that Soroyan didn't have like... formal writing training he was this like Armenian kid who just started writing and got really famous really fast for uh the the daring young man on the flying trapeze like he writes this one short story that's about a guy starving to death. And everyone's like, this is the voice of America. And he becomes like this cause celeb. And he wrote this play, this whole play he wrote.
On spec. No, not on spec. He was going to write something on spec. He wrote this play. The producer said, you write me anything and I'll buy it. He sat down. He wrote this play in a day and a half. Handed it in. He's like, yeah, I did a few revisions here and there, but this is pretty much what I wrote. And and wins like the Pulitzer Prize. Like he's.
He was just this wunderkind who believed in the essential goodness of humanity, believed that community was the most important thing in the world, believed that everyone had the possibility to be good within them. But he was also irascible. Well, also kind of a jerk. People didn't know what to make of him. And he was a real he was like he was a character. And he wrote Time of Your Life just to sort of as a sort of like.
I think he wrote, he had written My Heart is in the Highlands, and he said that critics didn't understand that. or they understood it, but they didn't know why they understood it. So they hated it. And so he was like, I'm going to write something that like everybody can understand, but nobody will understand. And that'll sort of like sum up all of humanity and I'll write it in a day and a half. And that's the time.
of your life you and i on this podcast discussed uh thordon wilder's um skin of our teeth which is another play from around the same time that attempts to tell a meta narrative about the human condition. It does that, that it does in this fantastical way and covers all of human history. Saroyan is trying here to be anthemic about putting in as many different characters as he can. And as many different, from as many different walks of life as he can.
The problem for me, bringing it through this time, is none of them are particularly well... They're sort of like, oh, I will put in the happy-go-lucky vagabond. I will put in the mysterious rich man. I will put in the hooker with a heart of gold. Every character is so archetypal in the laziest way. Archetypal! But I'll say the archetypal until they suddenly each get like a deeply philosophical monologue. And I think Soroyan, A, he based...
most of these people off people he ran into in real life. The bar is a real bar. It's an actual bar that he used to hang at. Honestly, can't remember the name of it off the top of my head. But he's like the only difference between that bar and the bar in time of your life was that that bar also had a lot of reporters who hung out at it. But he's like the bar, the barkeep would if you were a hungry vagrant, which there are. Plenty of, you came in, he'd fix you a steak, pour you a bowl of soup.
He wouldn't ever let anybody go hungry. And yeah, there were like a lot of sex workers who came in and out. There was always the cop on the beat. There was the detective who was trying to bust up the thing. And I think the reason they come off as archetypes to us now. is because this was kind of the birth of most of these archetypes was this era, this like he lived this life. And I think also being a play, you.
It it acts as a play should act, which is it's not complete on the page. You have to bring human beings into it to really fill out these roles. When I said that Tom was a hard role, even reading it now, I'm like. I can't tell what Tom is supposed to be. Is he stupid? Is he smart? Is he a thug? Is he muscle? I don't know what his, I can't really plan it. You have to bring all that to the character and.
And a lot of the roles are like that. And that's what makes doing the monologue so difficult is because if you just try to play the archetype, then you hit the Gene Kelly characters. You know, he's like, ah, I'm a comedian. I can sing and dance. I'm a funny guy. And then he launches into like the most bizarre avant garde.
comedy model. Like, I don't know what's happened. I've never seen it performed in a way that in any way can actually make sense to me, like in any way. But you're just like, there's something going on in this guy's head. He's just. This is what comedy is to him, I guess. I don't know. It's just there's something about you need to bring an actor to these roles in order for it to fully start making sense. Well, he was Andy Kaufman for his time. He was Andy Kaufman. It was real anti-comedy.
It is interesting what you say about the play is not sufficient on its own. The actors have to bring something to it because the other thing that is. Absolutely bizarre about reading this play as a reader is so much of Soroyan's writing is never going to be translated to the stage at all. And I'm talking about these.
three-page long stage directions when he introduces a character and he talks about the character's history. He doesn't talk about it in any way usable to an actor. He says things like... oh, she had the kind of face that would be beautiful even when it was ugly. And it's like, what? I probably have mentioned this before. It has my absolute favorite thing of all is when this character, Willie, shows up.
Very early on in Act One, he's going to be playing the pinball machine, which at this time is nothing like a contemporary pinball machine. It is more like a... pachinko machine yeah it's really hard to get a if people don't know it because he does he he reacts to it the way you would react to one of those machines which is like you pull the knob and then you just kind of let it do its thing right
And the stage direction tells the reader what the thematic significance of this scene is. Soroyan writes, he pushes down the lever. placing one marble in position, takes a very deep breath, walks in a small circle, excited at the beginning of great drama. stands straight and pious before the contest, himself versus the cunning and trickery of the novelty industry of America and the whole challenging world. He is the last of the American pioneers with nothing more to fight but the machine.
no other reward than lights going on and off and six nickels for one. And it goes on from there, actually. I'm cutting it short. This happens with almost every entrance of a character. We're given not really a biography because that would be too useful to an actor. We're given what this character means in a symbolic sense. I love it, though, because. To me, that's Soroyan at his most Soroyan, which is everyone who walks into this bar is worthy of this.
extrapolation of their behavior is worthy of this like laser focused analysis of what they're doing like the the the bum the kid who comes in off the street to play pinball wastes his day playing pinball because he doesn't have a job that's fast that's the american experience the the the longshoreman who comes in no that's the american experience right there the cop he's talking to no that guy who's getting paid to bust his friend's head
That's the American experience. And I feel like Soroyan is just saying with these. I mean, and also it's very George Bernard Shaw, like just this. I'm just going to give you my opinions on these people. Take take it for what you will. The fact that Soroyan is just like. I know that no one's ever going to make use of this, but God dang it, I'm a writer and I need you to know that I'm a writer at heart. I'm a good writer. I thought about this.
in a day and a half he thought he wrote it in a day and a half you mentioned tom and uh we should probably go through some of the major characters um If there's any character that's sort of central to this play, it's this character, Joe, who is a very wealthy man. The source of his wealth is never quite explained, but Joe is...
ashamed of it. At one point he talks about how no one gets wealthy except on the exploitation of others. He's kind of the opposite of... say uh charles foster kane which would be just just two years after this um he's he's this melancholy rich person you know he's he's he's actually gone We never get to see where he lives or what his life is like outside of this bar. He seems to live in the bar. And inside the bar, what he does is he sends his friend Joe off to... buy little knickknacks.
and fruits and bring them back and then distribute them around to the people he knows to try and make their lives happy. You know, he's kind of like an armchair psychologist. He looks at the people, he sees their inner sorrow and he thinks, well, you know what will really... make them happy is this little tin toy that will remind them of childhood. If he lived today, he would be sat in front of a computer on the internet all day because this is a guy who's like, I want to know about something.
The Internet doesn't exist, but I do have this guy whose life I saved, I guess, at some point. I nursed him back to health when he was dying, I guess. And I can just send him out to buy things for me and bring them back. It's a dream role. It's a dream role for two reasons. One, it's so meaty. Two, you don't have to get up. You only have to get up like...
Like twice in the whole play, like Joe gets to just sit and just talk. Also, the second time I ever worked on this play was in college for scene class. I worked on the Joe Mary scene with a scene partner and I chose it. I was like, I've always wanted to work on this thing. And all my acting teacher did. God love her. I love my acting teacher, Wendy. She was great. But for some reason she. that I didn't understand at the time. She hyper fixated on Joe being drunk.
She was like, it's very important you know how to play drunk. It's very important that you know what this guy is like when he's drunk, because he's drunk. You have to be able to pull off drunk. And I was like, I don't get it. Reading it now, I'm like, oh yeah, he is drunk the entire play. Like he never stops drinking from the minute he sits down and he only drinks champagne, which seems a little frivolous until I think it was Tina Landau pointed out. She said that.
He's a character who he never drinks beer or liquor. He only drinks champagne, which is like the drink you drink to to see in like new possibilities to celebrate and to like. and to look forward to new things, to a new year, to a new life, which is what he's doing for people the entire time. He's like, sit down and have some champagne. This is the beginning of the rest of your life every single day.
There's something about Joe. He's a curmudgeon. He's he's a loafer. He's described as a young loafer, which I don't know what Saroyan thought young was like. I always see him as like in his maybe in his. 40s or 50s, but he's a young loafer, and he's got this boy, this Tom, who's... an errand boy, but he's probably in his 30s or so. I don't know. And he gives them to he gives them to a prostitute. Right. Well, you talk about the scene between Joe and Mary and.
Joe is going to use some of his vast fortune to improve Mary's life. Oh, you're thinking of Kitty. Oh, sorry, Kitty. Yeah, sorry. Mary is Mary is the stranger from act two who he has a very long scene with and. She leaves and that's it. Mary's the one who the Mary's the one who asks him why he drinks all the time. And yeah.
Right. And he says that he he does it because what is the line? It's so I don't like to be dead most of the time and just a little alive every once in a long while. If I don't drink, I become fascinated by unimportant things like everybody else. I get busy. do things, all kinds of little stupid things, all kinds of little stupid reasons, proud, selfish, ordinary things. I've done them. Now I don't do anything. I live all the time. Then I go to sleep.
Mary's doesn't really have much of a story, right? She just, they have her listed here in the list of characters as an unhappy woman of quality and great beauty. Yeah, she's just a she's just a pretty woman who just comes to the bar for a drink and he starts hitting her up, kind of. Her name is Mary. Yeah, this is the thing I was going to say is that with Kitty, which you're right, I was thinking of Kitty.
But with Mary, too, one might expect a wealthy layabout in a bar to have plenty of time for romance. and might be willing to spread out some of the money to get some romance for himself. But he seems completely unable. to connect directly with people. He has to do it via the proxy of Tom of Tom. Yes, he. First of all, I'm going to assume that he had plenty of women before. If I was to play the role, I would play it as if I had lots of women. I don't know how I would convey that.
But I would I would bring that to the character just so people watching the play would go. I bet that guy's had lots of women. But no, I think that he had this past. He had this life. where he made a lot of money. He probably dated a lot, went to a lot of parties, a lot of shindigs, and then something happened. He was married. It said he was married at one point, and he just became incredibly unhappy. And now he's just going to sit here and live and try to make people's lives good. And.
I mean, that's what he wants to do for his work. And I guess, you know, that's what people say you should do if you have a lot of money. Just give it away. Spend it on other people. Right. But just like... Just as with billionaire philanthropists in our day, there is something strange about his charity being these very specific projects. He's not going down to...
Salvation Army and giving them his money. He's not buying war bonds, which I guess wouldn't be a thing at this point, but it would be in a couple of years. He's playing matchmaker and he's... And he's distributing watermelons. Okay. But what you're talking about is like the nonprofit problem, which is... Do you do you do you hyper focus on one specific, very, very specific mission or do you try to help everyone? He's.
He is mission focused. He's like, I'm going to start with this guy. I'm going to do something for this guy. If I can help this one guy, then I'll start on on the next guy. Watermelons for everyone else. Sex worker for this guy. Maybe for her, a toy. I'll buy her toys. I'll give her to him. Somehow it works out. Got watermelons for everybody else. And they're good watermelons. So Kitty, so Kitty, Kitty, Kitty Duvall, she is a she is a sex worker who was.
probably not really a vaudevillian burlesque dancer. We don't we don't we don't believe that she was actually in burlesque. She is perpetually harassed, though, by the worst person in the world. Glick? Blick? What's his name? Blick. A heel. The local detective who's just there to be the biggest jerk in the world. But even he, Joe, is like...
You know what? I bet deep down there's some good in that guy. I bet deep down that guy was pretty he's probably pretty decent deep down. Even though he literally does nothing except harass this poor woman played by Patti LuPone. in the video I watched. A very young Patti LuPone. Blick basically exists to be a thorn in everyone's side. But to the extent that it... he fits into Soroyan's vision. I think he represents the bad side of authority and the bad side of
A society governed by rules, because a society governed by rules can be easily manipulated by bad actors. As opposed to Joe represents a kind of an anarchic. vision of life, which is great if you have the money to do it. But he has he may be he may be a loafer. He may have no rules, but he has enormous largesse. Right. I mean, it's probably no like it probably doesn't come as any like surprise to anyone to be like Saroyan was fairly pro worker, fairly pro socialist, fairly pro like.
A little a little anarchy here and there. But even then, we have a cop in the play who is not presented as so much a bad guy as like. Just another guy caught in the big machine. Like he's he's best friends with a longshoreman who is on who is who is going to join the strikers. And they understand that even though they're best friends, the cop is going to have to crack the skull.
of his friend who's going to be on the picket line because that's just that's part of the machine they're in and their conundrum their life isn't presented as one of them is evil one of them is good Whereas Blick definitely is presented as the the the heat. He's the he's the he's the malevolence of society. These other two guys are just that's that's the hand life dealt them. And so they're playing their role.
Right. Well, Blick gets his comeuppance in the form of a character who's only called Kit Carson. Kit Carson! Kit Carson's great. Never given a real name. Just called Kit Carson because, again, the stage direction says he looks like Kit Carson. So now he's Kit Carson. through most of Carson's time on stage, he tells stories about his wide ranging life that seems to be on the end of the frontier. And.
He's presented as something of a Munchausen. He's going to tell stories that nobody's going to believe. But when it counts. He ends up with Chekhov's gun in his hand. He does end up. At one point, Joe sends Tom out and he's like, buy me a gun. And Tom's like, oh, what you want a gun for, Joe? Buy me a gun. And then like he just sort of has it there. And people are like, that's a pretty nice gun.
And he's like, sure is. And then at one point he just hands it to Kit Carson, who staggers out of the bar and then he kills Blake. It is sort of like putting a gun in the hands of a incredibly senile old man. Because I don't think Kit Carson realizes that he really did it at the end because he immediately turns what he did into.
another anecdote he tells it uh as if it's a story that happened to somebody else and how joe knew this would come about we don't know it's just it's part of the magic of the play but yeah the sort of like The sort of like clap your hands if you believe in Tinkerbell comes to life of this play is shooting a detective in cold blood in the middle of the street and just leaving the body there to be found. Yeah, it feels like, you know, for most of this play, there's so little plot.
In the sense of action happening on the stage, there are people talking about their, and sometimes they're talking about life before they were sitting here. But mostly they're talking about what they think the human condition is like. Right. That goes on for four and a half acts. And then in the last half act, Soroyan decides, oh, wait, I needed a plot. Yeah, I'm going to end this somehow. So the plot is Blick shows up, makes a complete nuisance of himself and gets dispatched.
But, you know, but in a cute way that keeps all of his main characters. with clean hands yeah all the characters come running in at the end they're like holy crap somebody shot that blick guy like that's that's it uh we do follow tom and kitty so they're the through line really if you're following It's they're kind of like in the original, original, like early Broadway and like even Chicago based production of Grease before it was like reduced to what we think of as Grease now. Sandy and Danny.
had their storyline, but they weren't the main characters. They were just two of the other characters you followed. They were the only ones who really had a beginning and a middle and an end. So you kind of used them as the skeleton to hang. the rest of the play on the rest of the play was very much like this just kind of a day in the life of these kids just hanging out in school and being jerks uh and i feel like that's kind of the thing with tom and kitty like they're not the main characters
But we got to keep coming back to them just so you remember that eventually this will end. Like eventually you're going to get your bus will be waiting. You'll get on your train and go home. But not only that, we do get to watch the saga of the guy. trying to find Elsie Mandelspiegel. The poor guy on the phone. Which character is he? Is that Dudley? Yeah. So this...
Through the course of the play, this guy, Dudley, is trying to reach this girl he's in love with, Elsie Mandelspiegel, which is one of those names that, like, Roger Ebert had this rule of, like, you know you're in trouble. If the writer gives people funny names.
If you're watching something and somebody has a funny name, you're like, oh, God, they just couldn't think of anything to do. So I don't know what Saroyan was doing because this is a great story. This guy gets a wrong number. He accidentally ends up hitting on the wrong woman. He sets up for her to show up anyway. And he's like, whatever.
I can't reach Elsie. I'll go off with this other woman who then shows up and is unattractive. And then he just like blows her off, even though she knows it's him. And it breaks her heart. But then Elsie shows up and they have this really intense, like weird, like she's seen some, she's a nurse. She's seen like some stuff at work. And so he's this sort of like. sitcom character and then his girl shows up and she's like if you're going to be with me
We're doing this for real. And he's like, OK, Elsie. And they like toddle off up the stairs. It's the strangest through line in the in the play. But it's one of the few stories that has a beginning and a middle and an end. You get to see their little like journey. Well, first of all, Roger Ebert must have hated Charles Dickens. But secondly, there are a couple of other tangential characters. Yeah. That their circumstances sort of change. I mean, the young boy who plays the piano.
Oh, Wesley. Wesley. I mean, he shows up. He starts playing the piano. He gets a job playing the piano. Right. And so I think the Mace. Basically, he exists, first of all, to give a source of diegetic music for the rest of the play. And also... Because he's, I hate to say it, filling a quota for Soroyan that he's going to have. Okay, here we have our African-American character. He has, likewise, a character called the Arab.
Not the most enlightened character, but I think in Soroyan's mind, he's trying to depict a wide variety of characters. Yeah. And I think like when you have the character named the Arab. Who's depressed. Like, no one really knows what's wrong with him. He only says a few lines. He says, no foundation all the way down the line. It's like his constant quote. And with Wesley coming in. And Wesley comes in, he's starving.
he faints they feed him he starts playing piano and they're like that's pretty good kid you should play every night and But what's interesting is that he specifies, this kid's African-American. He's really good at piano. But his race is never brought up. Like, that's never... Anything like it's never he becomes friends with Harry, the comedian, and they're sort of a little team after that. But the fact that he's black is not.
part of his story to such an extent that in the 1970s production I watched with Kevin Kline and What's-Her-Face as Kitty Duvall, that role was cast with a white guy. And I was like... Was there no black actor in 1977 or whatever this was that like you could cast in the role of it's the one black character and I don't know why they cast just some random was there no black actor who could play the piano that you could find
because I bet if you looked around a little bit more, you could find someone. But yeah, they cast a very white, white guy. I mean, I'm trying to I'm pushing back a little bit on what you say about these being archetypes, because I think they are archetypes in the sense that. He sets them up that way. He draws these very broad sketches of them, but that's so that he can, I think it's so that he can pull back and then zero in on them when he needs to.
but not make them so constantly specific that they just become a sea of people, but so that when you step back and look at the stage, you know who everyone is in this image. I guess. Part of my problem with this is the characters are introduced by their ethnicity, by their station in life. Then, by and large, they talk about, once again, the human condition. There's nothing about them that needs to be that.
ethnicity, that character. But it reminds me vaguely of, I've mentioned this before on the podcast, if you read... pre-war science fiction, and I haven't read much of it, but you read science fiction from the 30s, you get a lot of these characters who are referred to by their nationality. You read like... A Martian Odyssey, Stanley G. Weinbaum. And you have characters who are variously French, German.
and Russian. And you know that because they speak in ridiculous accents. In a way, this was kept alive in Star Trek many years later. You have characters who are sort of reducible to their accents. And... I don't know why that I feel like at the time that these things were being written, they were probably about as progressive as you got. Oh, yeah. But but today.
You know, it's like Chris Rock had that line about Franklin in Peanuts saying Franklin's characteristic was he was black. Yeah. And, you know, and I'll say, but. But again, like Wesley shows up and he's hungry, but he's not hungry because he's black. But I do think that Soroyan wanted to ensure that the neighborhood he lived in.
was represented in this play, that the people he saw in his day-to-day life were up there on stage. So you've got to specify that, I think. Especially at the time, no director was going to be like, well, we're going to do some diverse casting. No, you've got to have the playwright say, this is a black guy. This is a Middle Eastern guy. Or it's just going to be a bunch of white people up on that stage. I mean, I think he could have given.
the Arab guy, a few more lines. I don't even know if he's actually Arab. He, you know, they, I think that's just what they call him at the bar. I think it's that other thing where like when you walk into the bar. You are identified by your race, your station in life, your job. Like, that's the first thing I think people would learn about you is.
That's who you are, that you are your problems at that point. We're only going to get to know you. And probably Joe is only going to get to know you a little bit. And then you leave and then you have your drink or you have your soup or your sandwich and you leave. And Nick is. the only one who's kind of just like this.
starts out as a fully fledged out human as the barkeep. He's, he's the owner. He's got this mother. He's got a kid. He's, he's just trying to, he's, he's almost a sitcom-y like bartender in the sense that he's just constantly driven. to the brink by these wacky people who come in and out of his bar. In our high school production, Nick was cast as a woman progressive. She owned the bar.
She still smoked a cigar through the whole play. We did the play Because it was the length of one school period, we would do the play, our one-act plays, for the English classes, which means that we got to do it seven times in one day, which meant that our actress, Catherine... She smoked seven cigars in one day because she actually smoked on stage. We were allowed to smoke on stage. It was the 1990s. And if you were doing a play, you could smoke. She smoked seven cigars.
which she'd never smoked before. She wasn't a smoker. Catherine got really sick from cigars that day. I just, I think, I think I want to, if I leave you with nothing with that, it's that. Don't smoke seven cigars in one day if you've never smoked a cigar. After that, she just started chewing on them. She would just have them in her mouth. I don't even think it says that Nick smokes a cigar. I think that's just something that she wanted to do. You know, when I was a kid.
A lot of my a lot of the stuff that the culture I consumed had cigars and, you know, like you had Albert the alligator in Pogo with a cigar you had. You know, the Pinocchio, famously, they all smoke cigars and the pleasure. It was just sort of a... A shorthand for character. Yeah, I remember when cigars came back in like the 90s and like Demi Moore was photographed with a cigar and that was like a big deal. And it sort of meant like... I'm sophisticated, but I'm also relatable. Like I you can.
But I think at the time it meant I smoked cigars. I think it meant like at the time in the 1930s, it was like, I'm a guy, like I'm a guy and I got my hand on some cigars. Cigars came back in the late 90s, especially amongst the tech boom people. And in the same time that we had that brief stint with swing music and with martini culture. And I think that mostly what that was about was it was about Gen X.
like leapfrogging over the boomers to try and reach back into the silent generation for their culture, which is what happens. I think that, you know, you always get this situation where the next generation... doesn't like the generation right before them. So the generation before that is cool. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, it's yeah. No. Yes, that's exactly what happened. Also.
It was a pretty cool time to be alive. I mean, you know, the America was bustling. The economy was through the roof. The Twin Towers stood. Everything was great. Clinton was still in office. We hadn't had the. scandal yet it was we were riding high You could have movies like Love Actually, where you could you could actually run through an airport and you could run to run to the gate to stop someone. You might say it was the polar opposite of the world of the time of your life by William Soroyan.
where a bunch of sad sacks come into a bar, and they're just trying to live their lives, hoof it on stage, play the piano, and get harassed by a plainclothes cop detective. So... There's a scene, there's one scene outside the bar and it's Joe and Tom and Kitty in her apartment. That's really uncomfortable because one of her clients shows up.
and starts like hollering for her in the hallway. And then he bursts into the room and sees these two guys in there and he's like, Oh, sorry. You got your bit. You already got some guys in here. I'm sorry. And then like Tom like threatens to like kill him. It's the one scene that isn't in the bar, and they were like, we're just going to move this downstage a little bit. You wheel out of bed, and you do the scene.
And that's the only time Joe gets up to leave. You know, that is an odd thing because Soroyan... absolutely puts it into his description that there has to be a section of the stage that's set off sort of a tiny stage within a stage. And again, this reminds me very much of Tennessee Williams.
his stage directions for things like streak herding desire which require the use of scrims and revealing spaces and closing spaces off that's a And it felt like more like Soroyan thought, oh, yeah, I'd like to do that. somehow uh i think it's so they could it's so they could close the main curtain and change the set behind it for the uh the next big number this was the this was the curtain scene but you know when it's when it's um
And it's the three of them when it's Tom and Joe and Kitty. You know what it reminded me of, which is really perverse. It reminded me of that scene in the room. where Donnie is in with, uh, with, uh, what, what's his name with, uh, Tommy, Tommy Wiseau's character and with, uh, his Lisa Lisa. Yes. And, and they're saying like,
You know, three is a crowd. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on, Danny. Three is a crowd. Yep. Yeah, it's very much that scene. It's very much. This was the room of its day. This was Saroyan's. Weird vanity project. He just wrote it so that he could get his naked butt on stage. Shame that he wasn't cast as Joe.
No, there's a there's a terrible scene where Blick forces Kitty to get up on the stage in the bar and do a strip tease and like humiliates her in front of the whole bar. It's really uncomfortable, really uncomfortable when a bunch of high school. kids are doing it uh but uh but yeah She sings the Missouri Waltz. I remember our production, she sang the Missouri Waltz. And I remember the lyrics were something like, rest your head on mama's breast.
But our actress changed the lyrics to just rest your head on mama. And our director noticed. And he was like, what are you, what are you, why'd you change the lyrics? And she's like, well, you can't. I can't say breast on stage. And we just thought it was very strange. Like it's a scene where she's being borderline assaulted by a cop in front of a bar full of people. But she won't say a very innocent.
word in the play. That's high school for you. What did we know of Soroyan? It was also my introduction to the concept of existentialism because the actor playing Blick was really into... existentialists and he was reading a lot of existentialist philosophy. And so every time we'd get together for rehearsals, he'd be like, well, you know, you.
I'm just going to say, you can't really understand this part unless you've really read a lot of the existentialists. And he would just start discussing existentialism. And I'd be like, I don't know what you're talking about. I guess I'm not smart enough for this play because clearly this guy knows what he's talking about. He's read the existentialists, which I don't know.
what that is well he had read a lot of the existential he's just like what camu and uh i don't know he would just say the existentialist i'm sure he listed some names and they went over my head at the time i was a freshman in high school I was playing Tom. High school was different in those days. You know, I think about I think about the productions that we did and there were things that we did which were unsafe.
You know, actually, when I was when I was in college, we put on a production of Midsummer Night's Dream, which for which I designed the set and. The directors thought it would be a great thing if there would be a point at which Puck jumped off of this. outcropping that I had built into this abstract set and fell through a trap door in the stage. Wow. So the trap door in the stage. goes down to the level below us.
the basement so that's like a actual trap door like a 20 foot fall and so they what we did was he pulled in uh some porta pits from like the the track you know the kind that you land in when you uh do the pull vault yeah but but you know that is crazy
crazy, crazy dangerous when I think about it now. And I was, I was as complicit as everyone else. I was like, Oh yeah, I'll design this out that way. No. My college production of Midsummer Night's Dream, I was one of the people in charge of hauling the mattress out really quick so our puck could jump from a...
like eight foot platform onto a mattress that we would just yank out backstage. He'd hit it. And then we yank it back out. Cause it couldn't be there. Cause it, it blocked crossing lines, uh, backstage. See, yeah, no. theater was dangerous it's supposed to be dangerous like the high school theater was supposed to be dangerous too many kids these days with their disney musicals and their and their and their vetted scripts you you know what what ruined it all was spider-man turn on
the dark that was what did it that's after that it was all downhill baby and we did uh we did the lion in winter and my senior year And it was all going along swimmingly until the vice principal, not the principal, the vice principal got her hands on the script and demanded we make changes. And the changes she demanded we make were all references to the same-sex relationship.
relationship in it uh which is only like briefly talked about like i think it's like king philip and one of the sons have been involved in a in a in a sexual relationship and it's not explicit or anything, but we had to cut all the vague references to it. So our director was like, well, we can't talk about it now, but it's important to the character. So just sort of like insinuate it with your faces and stuff, which made the scene.
10 times gayer like 10 times more sexy and sexual between these two because they were having to like sort of like look at each other and like touch each other and like be like be very like physically intimate with each other like if they just let him say the lines i bet half the audience wouldn't have picked up on it wow they should have used that line on the uh on the poster
10 times gear. So the time of your life, we didn't have to cut anything from the time of your life, except for like two hours and 15 minutes of runtime for our, for our production. But, but. Yeah, I can say now, like having read it again, not really since college when I did that one scene study from it, that I think I...
I understand. I have a lot more patience for it. It makes more sense to me. And having read more Soroyan now and like read a lot of his biographical stuff and read about him, seeing what he was trying to do, like what his what is. And to be an audience member in 1939 and to go see this and be like, I don't know what this is I'm seeing, but it's fascinating. Like, this is very different from what I'm seeing.
from other playwrights, who is this guy who's heading off to Hollywood at some point and is going to have the worst time of his life there. Speaking of time of your life, the title. of the play comes from one of these asides, not even in the play. It's an introductory, I don't know what you would call it, like a prose poem that Soroyan writes. And I have seen playbills. where that's put you know they're trying
Somehow to make this a part of the play, because it contextualizes or it sets the stage for what kind of a story this is going to be. It could almost be done as a monologue before the. before the play. But he's not talking about the time you think the time of your life is going to mean, you know, the best time you had the way we people say use it. But no, he's saying in the time of your life live like this.
The literal, how long you're going to be alive, which, you know, I thought that was a clever. play on words. I kind of wish it had been somehow in the actual play itself. Well, I know that they were nervous about calling it the time of your life because they were worried that people would think it was going to be... A light comedy because it sounds like it sounds like a light comedy. I'm looking up. The original title was Sunset Sonata, which is horrible, like is horrible.
And so, yeah, they came with the time of your life. Even late in his career, Sororian was saying if he could go back and tweak more stuff in it, he would. But that opening... monologue or not monologue preface or whatever submission statement it's more of a mission statement Yeah, I've seen it done where like a voiceover does it like on TV movie versions of this. A voice will do like a truncated version of it. But it ends with that.
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. And I think that's kind of the point of Joe, which is... I spent my whole life trying to make money and I made money and I'm miserable. I made other people miserable, even worse. And.
My my goal now is to live life. And that doesn't mean running off to other countries and like having adventures and like having a bucket list. It means sitting in one place, observing everything that happens and not making anyone. miserable, not, not contributing to the misery and sorrow, but making people smile and pointing things out to people and hoping they notice them. I think it's kind of a futile gesture in a little, uh, a little.
he has his cannabis blinders on at times. Like these people are just trying to get back home. Some of them are starving. Like they don't, you got to get to a certain place and then it meets your hierarchy of needs. And then you can start enjoying the delights of the world, Joe. But. But I think that's Saroyan's whole thing is that is, yeah, just live a good life. Be a good person and live a good life and don't make other people miserable.
Hierarchy of Needs would have been a better title. Sunset Sonata sounds like something that would be on Cinemax in the 80s. Yeah. Everything you said is right. And that's probably where we should we should leave this. But I can't help. But point out that when I was reading up on Soroyan, that I found out that his cousin was David Seville. Yes. Yes. Yes.
The fact these two Armenian guys, cause Soroyan wrote, uh, he and Seville co-wrote, um, uh, come on to my house by Rosemary Clooney. Rosemary Clooney's one of my house. The fact that that William Soroyan and and Ross Bagdasarian were were cousins and not only were cousins, but worked together. The fact that we never got a Soroyan penned chipmunks movie. Now that would have been something to see. I imagine, I imagine Theodore in the Tom role.
Like like like the the very tired and very done. Which Muppet would you cast in this in this play? Which chipmunk would you cast? You only got three to choose from. So choose carefully. Well, you have the chipettes or whatever the female. You do, and there are like three women in this place. Wow. Well, any last words or shall we end it on the chipmunks? Let's end it on the, as I always say, let's end it on the chipmunks. Okay.
Thanks again to guest host Phil Gonzalez. If you have an idea for a book, story, poem, or other reading to cover on a future episode or a suggestion for a guest host, Or if you simply like to say hi, you can write me at sophomore.literature at gmail.com. The Sophomore Lit theme song is by Malcolm Nygaard. This podcast is brought to you by The Incomparable Network. More funny, smart podcasts are available. At the incomparable.com. Including. Including. Oh, mine? No. Ours.
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