The Time of Your Life
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The Time of Your Life, a three-act play by American playwright William Saroyan that opened in 1939. This play was the first drama to win both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The play opened 25 October 1939 at the Booth Theatre in New York City. It was produced by the Theatre Guild and with staging by Eddie Dowling and William Saroyan.
The play is set in a decrepit bar called Nick's Pacific Street Saloon, Restaurant and Entertainment Palace in San Francisco. Much of the action of the play centers around Joe, a young loafer with money who encourages each of the bar's patrons in their eccentricities. Joe helps out a would-be dancer, Harry (Gene Kelly) and sets up his flunky, Tom with a prostitute, Kitty Duval. The bar is also frequented by a number of colorful characters, including a frenetic young man in love, an old man who looks like Kit Carson, and an affluent society couple.
Critic John Brown Mason described this modern morality play as "gleeful and heartbreaking, tender and hilarious, probing and elusive."
The Time of Your Life has been revived three times on Broadway - in 1940 with Dowling and Saroyan directing again, in 1969 directed by John Hirsch and 1975 with directed by Jack O'Brien. It was made into an unsuccessful film in 1948, starring James Cagney as Joe and his sister Jeanne Cagney as Kitty Duval. It has also been presented on television more than once, most recently in 1976 on PBS, featuring a then-unknown Patti LuPone (as Kitty) and Kevin Kline (as Mccarthy, called a "blatherskite" in the program). Nicolas Surovy played Joe.
The prologue of "The Time of You Life" is used as the opening spoken word piece, guest-voiced by rapper MF Doom, on the eponymous album by the artist, Fog, [1].
