"The Time of Your Life"
looks a bit like playwright William Saroyan's answer to The Iceman Cometh. Both are set in seedy bars whose denizens have scarcely any life beyond their confines, but while O'Neill exposes and disdains their "pipe dreams" Saroyan suggests they're the most valuable currency of survival. The years have been unkind to the declamatory writing of both pieces, though O'Neill's volubility connects better with contemporary audiences than Saroyan's fortune-cookie epigrams: "In the time of your life, live!"Whatever the failings of the play, though, Tina Landau's production is wholly absorbing. Her ear for period music and almost balletic choreography of the enormous cast turn an overwritten meditation on being alive into a visceral experience of it. In this, The Time of Your Life shares much with "Time to Burn," Landau's 1997 adaptation of Gorki's The Lower Depths several years ago. But Saroyan gives Landau a better structure within which to work, providing plot movement to counteract the characters' apparent stasis. In particular, his specificity about period (1939: the Depression and the eve of the Second World War) provides additional resonance to -- or silently rebuts -- everything said on stage. GW Mercier's set makes manifest the power of what's happening outside to shape even the most insular world: the bar has a door but no walls, leaving the mean streets of San Francisco's waterfront visible and audible at all times. The world is too much with the people in Nick's bar, and with the audience.
Yet Landau's production, no less than Saroyan's script, holds out for the power of the world inside each of us. The director's master stroke was casting Guy Adkins as Harry, the wanna-be comic song-and-dance man, for Adkins is a powerhouse musical-theater performer as well as a fine straight actor. His renditions of "I Won't Dance" and other period standards shift seamlessly between the kind of work Harry can do as an amateur who dreams of being a star and the brilliant work of which Adkins himself is capable. His is the voice in the wilderness, and whenever it rings out-at the end of each act, especially-Saroyan's celebration of the human spirit is elevated beyond its dated language to timeless eloquence.
Steppenwolf founding member Jeff Perry plays Joe, the mysterious central character who serves as patron saint of the rest without ever rising from his chair. Playing Buddha is a challenge for an actor whose physicality constitutes so much of his persona, but Landau's decision to cast Perry against type pays off. His restraint makes all the more joyous the moment when he breaks out, challenging his factotum Tom (the stalwart Patrick New) to a gum-chewing contest. Their rapid-fire eradication of half a dozen packs and equally rapid-fire delivery of lines over, around and through the growing wads in their mouths are a delight.
The entire cast is strong, but a word of particular praise is due ensemble member Rick Snyder, who stepped into the role of Kit Carson on opening night after Howard Witt suffered a heart attack (from which he's now recovering). Snyder's submersion in his character was so thorough that I thought Carson was spinning old yarns by reading from his memoirs. Only when I spied the telltale yellow highlighter on the page did I realize that the actor was still on book. The words 'grace under pressure' come to mind.