 "Photo: The Time of Your Life by Casey Prather / The Towerlight")
 "Photo: The Time of Your Life by Casey Prather / The Towerlight")
Towson's department of theatre arts has been in need of a cheering up. After the witch-hunts of “The Crucible,” the family tension of “The Piano Lesson” and the sexual struggles of “Miss Julie,” it seems the last thing the stage needs is more depression.
Enter “The Time of Your Life.” The Pulitzer Prize-winning play by William Saroyan is a Great Depression era work, but that doesn't mean it's depressing.
“This isn't a kind of a 'ha-ha' lines funny comedy,” director Peggy Penniman said. “It's human beings at their funniest.”
The play, which officially opens Friday night in the Mainstage Theatre, depicts a large ensemble of characters in a San Francisco bar in 1939, discussing their lives and issues. The cast is one of the largest of any theatre department production this year, with 23 characters walking in and out of the bar. For most of the play there can be three, four or five simultaneous centers of action
The colorful cast includes a prostitute, a streetwalker, a pinball addict, rich people, poor people and some people simply looking for an escape.
Penniman said that going large was intentional, coming on the heels of “Miss Julie,” which only had three characters, but the size came with its challenges.
“It's challenging in a surprising way because each of the characters is in a sense off in his or her own world, so it's an ensemble for the actors. But for the characters, a lot of them don't actually ever interact,” she said.
Penniman said the play relates “frighteningly” to modern times.
“A lot of the characters are in precarious financial situations. We have two characters who are openly identified as not having eaten for a while,” she said. “It's a hangover from the Depression and the accommodations and the precarious lives the characters are leading because of the financial past and yet also looking ahead, because Saroyan... was very conscious of looming war.”
“The Time of Your Life” centers on Joe, played by senior theatre major Robert Loreto. Joe is a rich, laid-back young man who stays seated, drinking champagne for most of the play. Loreto described Joe as a “loafer with money.”
“He's a guy that has a lot of money, and he's said he's hurt people to get the money,” Loreto said. “He's trying to create a civilized life, at least a life that can't hurt any other life, so that's almost very Buddhist in a way, that he doesn't want to hurt anybody else.”
Throughout the play, Joe uses his money as a tool to make himself and others happy. He sends a friend to buy large quantities of champagne, gum, magazines and toys.
Repeatedly, he buys all the newspapers a paperboy is carrying, only to toss them across the room from his chair.
Loreto said it was a challenge to convey relationships and perform without moving around very much and keep “this sense of distance but closeness.”
“It was really challenging at first, but once you slip into the character it becomes gradually and gradually less complicated.”
Loreto spends nearly the entire play onstage, as does senior theatre major Danielle Robinette, who plays Nick, the bar's owner. In the original 1939 play, Nick was a man.
“In a university setting, I am always looking for ways to improve the gender balance and provide more roles for women, especially when we want to do pieces from the whole history of theatre. And frankly, there have been periods where women were not in as many roles,” Penniman said.
“And so I looked at this piece very carefully and realized that the bartender Nick did not actually have to be a man. In a way, you could say I made our Nick the widow of the Nick that Saroyan wrote.”
Robinette said the chance to portray a female entrepreneur in that time period was exciting. Nick, regardless of gender, takes the role of nurturer to the bar patrons, providing drinks and even jobs to patrons.
“I don't think it's maternal or anything, but I just think she likes making people happy, so she kind of goes out of her way to make people happy, but on her own terms,” she said.
Senior theatre major Chris Rudy plays Harry, a showman who gets a job as a comedian, tap dancer and bartender at Nick's bar. Harry spends most of the play tap dancing by a piano, or attempting to do jokes. Relearning how to tap dance was a challenge for Rudy, who last performed in a high school production of “Oklahoma!.” Rudy said Harry is eager to please, but also has a serious side.
“He's not just like happy-go-lucky all the time, so it's kind of an odd combination, what a serious artist he is. He takes these vaudevillian sort of conventions,” he said. “As different as he is from me, he's also very similar because he wants to take his talent and give it to people and help people and make people smile, especially when in this play, as he says, people really need to smile.”
Penniman acknowledged the cognitive dissonance of “The Time of Your Life”; how there is so much optimism and so much smiling in a time when there was so much uncertainty.
“And that's why this has always been a controversial play. It's been highly praised, but also it elicits incredibly strong opinions about the positive and negative.”
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