Saroyan on Screen: The Time of Your Life - Part 3
By the 1970s, Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life had become an American classic. Early in the decade, Henry Fonda fronted a touring production of the play staged by the Plumstead Playhouse. This was a very popular, and financially successful, revival. In 1974, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, presented The Time of Your Life. Saroyan himself was not a fan of the Plumstead version, saying that Fonda was too old to be playing Joe, and may not have been aware of the Oregon production.
One production of the 1970s was staged by The Acting Company, a new touring theatre group founded by American stage legend John Houseman using graduates from what would become the premier American school of acting: Juilliard.
Juilliard was founded as the Institute of Musical Art in 1905, initially as a school to train American composers and players who otherwise would go to Europe to study. In 1951, Juilliard added a Dance department, and by the end of the 1950s, the school’s governors voted to move the school to become a part of a new project to build an Arts Center in Manhattan. The center would become Lincoln Center, future home of the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the New York Ballet, and the new Juilliard. As a part of the massive project, the school did not pay for the construction, but agreed to only instruct advanced students and add a Drama division.
The initial director was John Houseman. His career stretched back to the late 1920s, but he gained fame in the 1930s through his collaborations with Orson Welles and the productions they undertook with the Works Project Administration’s Federal Theatre Project, such as MacBeth and The Cradle Will Rock. They left the WPA and co-founded The Mercury Theatre with Welles. During the period when The Mercury Theatre was rising, Houseman also took a job teaching acting at Vassar. He would continue collaborating on Welles’ radio and early film work, as well as other projects on his own, until a falling out with Welles soured their relationship for good. Houseman went to Hollywood, working first for David O. Selznick Productions, where he co-wrote Jane Eyre (which starred Welles) and produced and directed Saroyan’s play Hello Out There for its world premiere starring Harry Bratsburg in Pasadena Playhouse. Over the following decades, he would work for many Hollywood studios, notably RKO and MGM, mostly as a producer, but also as an actor and screenwriter.
When he joined Juilliard, he was famously tough on actors. Patti LuPone said in 1975. “They really worked us, 12, 13 hours a day, class, rehearsals, shows. Only 14 graduated. Some dropped out, some were eliminated, there were a few nervous breakdowns and a couple of attempted suicides.”
Even though he was incredibly exacting, he was less than willing to see his exceptional group of actors go to the winds following graduation. Along with Margot Harley, Houseman founded the Group 1 Acting Company, specifically to tour shows by that initial group from Juilliard. Harley, a fellow Juilliard instructor, was producer while Houseman was Artistic Director. The initial idea was to tour various shows. Houseman believed that touring made for better actors, but there was a more practical financial reason. Harley said "We knew perfectly well that in order to keep them together we had to tour, because nobody would come and see, over a long period of time, a young company in New York. And touring is historically a great training ground for an actor."
The Group 1 Acting Company became simply The Acting Company after new actors joined to replace the initial actors, who had been a part of Juilliard’s Group One drama students.
In 1974, The Acting Company started touring a set of plays Edward II by Christopher Marlowe, Play by Samuel Beckett, The Orchestra by Jean Anouilh, Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare and The Time of Your Life by William Saroyan
The play toured across North America with a cast of actors who would go on to have incredible careers in Hollywood and on Broadway. Nicolas Surovy played Joe. Surovy has appeared in dozens of films and several television series over the last five decades. Patti LuPone played Kitty Duvall, and was clearly the breakout star of the initial group. Shortly after leaving The Acting Company, she began regularly appearing on Broadway, winning the Tony for Best Actress in Evita in 1979. She has appeared in dozens of films, won two more Tony Awards, two Grammy Awards, and twice been nominated for Emmy awards. Kevin Kline would win three Tony awards and an Oscar for his comedic work in A Fish Called Wanda. In the Acting Company production, he played the philosophical longshoreman McCarthy.
The role of Kit Carson has always been considered one of the most prized in modern American theatre. David Schramm was given the role. He would later become known for his role on the television series Wings, but was involved in theatre until his death in 2020.
Benjamin Hendrickson played the barkeep Nick. His career would include appearing in the film Manhunter, and later spending twenty years playing Hal on the soap opera As the World Turns.
Tom was played by Norman Snow, who would also appear in Manhunter. He would be best known as a character actor in television, though he still appeared often in stage productions.
The production toured, and at the end of the tour, the play was filmed as a television episode for Great Performances.
Great Performances grew out of New York Television Theatre, a series produced by WNDT and later WNET. These were eventually shown on National Educational Television, NET, which became PBS in the early 1970s. In 1973, a grant from Exxon and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting funded Theatre in America, which showed plays that had been produced for New York Television Theatre as well as some NET Playhouse programs, including the Opera version of Saroyan’s My Heart’s in the Highlands in 1970. In 1976, the program was re-named Great Performances, with varying kinds of shows themed as Theatre in America, Music in America and Dance in America. The series was created by Jac Vanza. He was one of the driving forces in bringing the arts first to NET and later PBS, producing programs for more than 40 years. He created Live from Lincoln Center, which later became a part of Great Performances. His creation of NET Playhouse is considered revolutionary in that it showed complete theatrical performances as they would have appeared on stage.
The Time of Your Life was produced as a Theatre in America production. It was filmed on a sound stage and not a staged production filmed, as often was the case for Great Performances. The set is fairly simple, simpler than the Cagney film set, and less stage-like than the Gleason version. Shooting on a stripped-down set allowed for greater access to actors for close-ups, multi-character shots, and non-static set-ups. This shows the advances made in television production. Cameras in the 1950s were large, and those that could move were typically large and on wheels. By the 1970s, smaller cameras, with less cabling, meant that the use of cameras on jibs and cranes became more and more common, and wheeled cameras and even handhelds, began to be used more widely.
After the introduction by Hal Holbrook, the first voice we encounter is William Saroyan’s.
Saroyan had written a well-known and loved prologue to the play, and is usually reprinted in nearly every program when the play shows. This was the only time Saroyan appeared in any form in an adaptation of The Time of Your Life, though his photo does show up briefly in the Cagney version. He is clearly not a young man anymore. He had recorded a number of speeches and stories as early as the 1940s, but here he sounds older, maybe a bit slower. It’s still powerful and sets a fascinating tone for what becomes an incredible document of the next generation of American actors.
On my recent re-watch, the camera movement is the first thing that comes to mind. While there is some simple movement in both the feature film and Playhouse 90 versions, the videography in this version is so much more fluid, and it takes the immediacy of video and uses the techniques of film cinematography. One thing that was seldom employed in television videography was multiplanar staging. The way this version is shot uses foreground characters as anchors, even as the dialogue and emotional focus of the scene are in the mid-ground, and then the sense of place and time are established in the deep background. That idea also allows for status to be played up. When our two slumming rich folks are in the absolute foreground, they are removed from the world that flows in and out around Joe, and Nick, in the background, is the key to the entire scene, as he is clearly observing. He plays the closest thing to God that appears in the play, watching and judging, and only stepping in when his people are harmed. It’s impressive shooting, delivering not just visual interest, but also meaning.
The performances here show why this has always been seen as an actor’s play. It is full of monologues, complicated characterizations, and themes that can be mined or buried depending on an actor’s choice. Here, performed by a group of actors who have trained under some of the most advanced techniques known to actors at the time, the range of reactions is impressive. Considering these, you have to start with Joe. He is the driver, and here Nicolas Surovy gives him a unique take that seems to push forward different aspects based on his own drunkenness.
Or, perhaps better stated, the traditional path of a night of drinking.
Things start out light, even, kinda easy. Joe is playful, sending his lackey Tom out to buy him toys, and then as the play goes on, and he gets more and more champagne drunk, he gets more emotional, at times impulsive. He has Tom buy him a gun. He starts singing. He’s more and more talkative, even silly at times, and then he gets seriously testy. As the climax happens, off-screen, he comes to realization and, at least somewhat, regret. The way he approaches it makes that idea consistent and powerful.
Tom is played with a kind of Gosh Wow! along with the slightly put-upon, and sometimes whiny, way that it was played in both the Playhouse 90 and Cagney versions. Norman Snow’s take is exceptionally open, and his reactions are both more naturalistic and pronounced. There’s never a question that he is moving through the story with the goal of being with Kitty. There is a read of the character that he wants to save her, but Joe is already doing that, and here that feels like it’s pushed behind Tom’s emotional connection. Tom, in fact, counts on Joe to save Kitty as much as he did when Joe nursed him back to health three years before our play rolls out.
Kitty you can talk about for ages. The Cagney and Palmer performances are far more traditional than LuPone’s, which seems somewhat restrained until you see the entirety and realize that she’s actually hitting every note with direction. She’s guiding her reactions to the other players through a series of difficult emotional peaks and valleys. She’s sadder, more fragile, damaged. She’s clearly not steady on her emotional feet. She sways with the waters she waded too far into, and she reaches out and hopes to find purchase. When she is with Joe, she is at her strongest and can be any emotional state. With Tom, she’s bringing her softest self. When she is left with Blick…it shows her devastation.
And the scene of the heel cop forcing her to do a Burlesque strip number is crushing. No other recorded version gives it the weight that it holds here, and LuPone’s intensity takes it from something that is a powerful moment into something that defines the entire dénouement of the play. She’s incredible, and it shows the advances in acting techniques. She is so incredibly natural, if you buy into the idea that she is either suicidally depressed or perhaps bipolar. Both of these readings of her performance can be completely backed, and the harm done by the interaction with Blick is crushing.
Blick is pure malevolence. There is no subtlety in Blick’s view towards everyone who haunts Nick’s, but the performance is only very briefly anything more than a calm delivery of bestial hate. There is rarely a performance that is so straight ahead that doesn’t feel as if it is simply predetermined to cause anguish. Saroyan wrote this that way, and it makes clear that Saroyan is on the side of the common man by presenting him without any redeeming qualities, in a way that is more a defence of the common man than any of McCarthy’s monologues. Blick is a force of harm, and he naturally tries to place that harm on the people inhabiting Nick’s.
While traditionally Kit Carson is a showy role, and here it’s still a lot of fun, but he’s folded in more actual reality than in other versions. As big and bold as James Burton’s performance was, David Schramm’s performance here is feeling out the edges of the room, as if each wild story that he tells is sending out a lure to find a bite. It’s tricky stuff, and it works. His interactions with Joe, especially, feel almost like a crazy uncle with his nephew. His interactions with Blick are fascinating as they show a number of aspects of his character, that he is a defender of the weak, at least in his mind, and when he takes action to show, we have to question whether or not the rest of the tall tales are fantasies or not. Schramm’s choices here make the idea that Kit Carson is, in fact, the actual hero of the stories he tells not only a stronger possibility, but almost a certainty.
Perhaps no one gets as much out of every second of time on-screen as Richard Ooms as The Arab. The role that is best known for the repeated line “No foundation all the way down the line.” It is often used as a punctuation for scenes and moments. Ooms brings more to the role, including a devastatingly powerful monologue about work that he delivers exactly how an immigrant would not only deliver, but feel at their very heart. His vocal work in the role is incredible, and Ooms is
The reaction to the show was strongly positive. The Los Angeles Times praised performances. “Patti LuPone is splendid as Kitty and Norman Snow matches her as Tom,” and goes on to praise Schramm’s turn as Kit Carson as “a gem of character acting.”
As always, there were those who took it otherwise, though more against the source material than the performances of this particular version. The New York Daily News said that “…the groping naïve souls who frequent Nick’s waterfront bar somehow don’t interest us.”
The Acting Company’s initial stars, especially LuPone and Kline, would leave over the following year. Great Performances would become one of PBS’ most important shows. One missing part of the story is what Saroyan thought of this version. While he agreed to be a part of it, possibly because of Houseman’s involvement, we’ve been unable to find any reference to his having seen it. At the time of its premiere, he was in Europe, so perhaps that’s why he never made mention of it in his journals.
Next to, we’re stepping back to 1948 and a short film, Hello Out There, which also happens to be the last film directed by a Cinema Legend: James Whale.
