The First Hippie

Whenever a play is revived, it is rewritten, to some extent, by its new audience. What was once vivid may now appear dim. What passed for honest emotion may now be disdained as gluey sentimentality. Each successive age accords authority only to its own brand of vision and sophistication.

All of these things have happened to William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, first performed 30 years ago and currently revived with care, affection and excellence by Director John Hirsch and the Lincoln Center Repertory Company. In the context of 1969, the play has been transformed in several fascinating ways. What baffled audiences in 1939 is quite clear now. In retrospect, The Time of Your Life is revealed as a kind of prophecy, as well as play, prefiguring changing dramatic trends and the skeptical questioning of American values.

Saroyan was the U.S. father of the unmade play. The Time of Your Life was not carpentered but spilled out within the boozy confines of a San Francisco waterfront bar. It is a combination of mood music and action painting. In 1939, this was as disconcerting and puzzling to playgoers as Harold Pinter's plays have proved to be to more recent theater audiences.

Saroyan's characters are more than slightly alienated from each other, unmotivated in conventional terms, and obsessively concerned with self-expression. One boy insists that he wants to be a hoofer and comedian, though he is a pathetically inept dancer and his jokes fall flat. At one point, Joe (James Broderick) the cafe philosopher who dominates the stage, puts 27 sticks of gum in his mouth because he has always wanted to do it. When Saroyan says, "In the time of your life, live," one realizes almost eerily that there, 30 years ago, the cry was first raised about "doing your own thing."

To the audience of today, these characters seem like a commune of dropouts, and Saroyan qualifies as the first articulate hippie. They are deliberate outcasts in search of saintly goodness, and their symbol, Kitty Duval (Susan Tyrrell), the stock prostitute with the heart of gold, has a luminous inner purity. When cops enter the bar and beat the black jazz pianist bloody, the scene has a truncheon-like impact that was totally lacking in 1939, when such events seemed isolated from any social context with which the audience was familiar. In those days, Saroyan was known as the "crazy man" of the theater. Now it seems more as if he had the intuitive sanity of a seer.

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