It’s 1939, the Great Depression has been permeating people’s lives for nearly a decade. In a lousy neighborhood in San Francisco, a small bar is frequented by cops and criminals, the love struck and the heartbroken, the hopeless and the hopeful. So is the setting of William Saroyan’s 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Time of Your Life. The Washington-Lee High School Drama Department will be performing the play as the school’s fall show this year, Nov. 17-19 at 7:30 p.m.
The bar at the center of the play is owned and operated by Nick (Ryan Zellman), a hard-working man who just wants to stay out of trouble. Joe (Danny Cackley) is a regular customer who passes the days trying to cheer other people up with odd jobs and the occasional glass of champagne. Joe has taken Tom (Ahmed Helmy), a young man with no particular job skills, under his wing as an assistant of sorts. When Tom falls for Kitty (Becky Spavins), a reluctant streetwalker who dreams of being a famous actress, Joe takes on the task of getting the two together. But there are always those who try to get in the way of happiness.
The play is more than a love story, though. There are plenty of other characters trying to work hard and figure out how to better their lives. On stage are a longshoreman, a piano-player, a dancer, downtrodden streetwalkers, cops—both good and bad, and a mysterious immigrant who rarely speaks (Alex Srisuwan). Comic relief comes by way of out-of-place aristocratic types, a sailor, a pinball-obsessed kid, a desperately love sick young man, his desperately philosophical girlfriend, and a bar regular with plenty of stories to tell but waning credibility (Zach Bowman).
As the first show this year, “Time of Your Life” will be the last show performed in Washington-Lee High School’s Auditorium. Construction for the new Washington-Lee will begin later this year, and the close to 40-year-old theater will be torn down to make way for a technologically and environmentally advanced new building. Anyone wishing to see the theater one last time, or to see it for the first, should attend.