All together now
William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life celebrates the subversive qualities of community.

By Robert Avila

SOMETIMES YOU WANT to, you know, go where everybody knows your name. Today that's probably the Department of Homeland Security. But there was a time when the local saloon was the nucleus of a working-class neighborhood. The old labor movement owed much to this vital social nub. No wonder the bar as we once knew it has gradually morphed out of existence. A business-run society prefers its labor force in tractable isolation, a confused mass of atomized consumers.

Community is subversive. William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life (1939) suggests just how subversive it can be, especially in a time of war and social unrest. The play unfolds, with a minimum of plot but plenty of style and bar-stool philosophy, in a waterfront watering hole on San Francisco's Embarcadero in 1939, a local haven of outcasts of the depression on the eve of World War II.

Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater Company, in association with American Conservatory Theater and the Seattle Repertory Theatre, delivers an exhilarating and perfectly tuned ensemble production that makes Saroyan's trenchant humanism vivid and compelling. Along with the play's considerable humor and buoyant energy, his unabashed plea for love and understanding registers strongly at a time in many ways as troubled and unsure of the future as the '30s were.

In director Tina Landau's effervescent, inspired production, the stage already percolates with life as the audience takes its seats. Inside an enormous industrial frame, the wooden interior of the saloon glows warmly like a burnished nest. The cavernous, not to say tavernous stage wraps the characters' '30s inflections in a little period reverb, while its assortment of down-and-out and eccentric types invites the viewer, like a Works Progress Administration mural, to revel in a sense of chaos and community, where the eye lights on one idiosyncratic personality after another in an anonymous pageant of working-class life.

The Pacific Street pub run by Nick (Yasen Peyankov), its tough but big-hearted proprietor, nurtures the dreams of more than a dozen characters.

Saroyan underscores a perennial theme, true of so much socially conscious art in the 1930s, that casts the small town as the lost American Eden. Moreover, alongside the wonderfully human touches Saroyan brings to his characters and their relationships stand the more self-consciously symbolic characters, familiar antagonists of the period's socially committed drama: a tuxedoed gentleman (Tom Blair) representing the capitalist, an eloquent Harry Bridges-esque longshoreman named McCarthy (Andy Murray) standing in for the worker, and a predatory vice-squad officer named Blick (Lawrence MacGowan) as the police state incarnate.

Saroyan's Joe (Jeff Perry) registers the central philosophical tension in the play. He's both unusually engaged and perpetually aloof. Having turned away in disgust and shame from an exploitative system in which, he says, even "passive" moneymaking from interest inevitably means hurting faceless people somewhere down the line, he finds himself no longer closed off by self-interest from the lives around him. Yet Joe admits he's still groping (while leaving his chair as little as possible) toward another way of life, and he proves wary of McCarthy's revolutionary agenda. He sees social salvation in terms of personal redemption but has a hard time moving that formula beyond the bar.

Not unlike Joe, Saroyan is most comfortable working on a human scale; larger systems and patterns overwhelm him. Tellingly, although Joe plays savior throughout – turning water into champagne, as it were, from some mysterious source of wealth – as a man of action, he proves inept (he can't even dance). Instead, when push comes to shove, an old codger and fabulist they call Kit Carson (the wonderful Howard Witt) saves the day. A cartoon brought brilliantly to life, an angel fashioned from the American frontier myth, Carson speaks to Saroyan's unabashedly childlike faith in a certain type of American character, one colored by his backward glance at an imaginary past. When faced with the full violence of the system, Joe is helpless, but Carson comes off the funny pages to redeem all those legends. Saroyan's own distrust of social movements may have led him to a resolution so fanciful and childish. He strikes a truer note when he has Joe, clearly an alter ego of sorts, put off the soapboxing McCarthy's "Are you with me or against me?" with the canny answer "I'm with everybody. One at a time."

Still, social evolution demands respect for life, and Saroyan's genuine fascination and adoration point the way, turning Nick's saloon into the model of another world, where those who enter awaken into their own dreams through the love and mutual aid of others. Outside, in a world built around the profit motive, evolution may go on looking like a competition of each against all. But for Saroyan's barflies, survival, in the fullest sense, means community, and community bases itself on another evolutionary value entirely. Truly this is the time to bring it back.

'The Time of Your Life' runs through April 25. Wed/7-Sat/10, April 13-17, and 20-24, 8 p.m. (also Wed/7, Sat/10, April 17, 21, and 24, 2 p.m.); Sun., 2 p.m., Geary Theater, 415 Geary, S.F. $16-$73. (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org.