By the show’s end, the latest adventure from [The Feast] had all the makings of a disaster. Its difference may be its salvation.
If you know a line, just sing it out!
None of us at the table could figure out why pages upon pages of the script were scattered around on the audience tables woven throughout the set. Their real purpose was never explained. But with the chaos on stage at the end, that invented explanation — throw out a line if the spirit moves you! — seemed just as likely as any other.
If you think this is a pan — which, by almost any usual indicator it probably should be — you might be surprised.
The Williams Project’s production of The Time of Your Life — the second of the company’s two shows on rotation now through this weekend — is a series of surprises in itself. The contemporaneously-set 1939 play, by William Saroyan, recalls San Francisco’s Embarcadero area, before it boasted terraced office towers and hotels and chic cocktail bars. Indeed, a bar denizen notes that a couple of out-of-place, well-dressed tourists wandering in must have overshot the fanciful downtown bars by mistake. (The Williams Project version envisions the Seattle staging’s site instead, which is far from a wharf but otherwise works, thematically.)
The central characters are Nick, who owns the bar; Kitty Duval, a lady of the night who claims a coast-to-coast career pedigree in burlesque; Joe, something of a weasel, with too much money and too little imagination or purpose; and Tom, his errand boy, who seemingly fetches sundry items for Joe’s entertainment. The numerous other characters in and out include Dudley, a man in dire search of a gal; Elsie, his longed-for gal; a cop; a drunk man who looks like Kit Carson; a man and a woman clearly visiting from somewhere else; and a man referred to only by his ethnicity (“Arab” in the script, “African” in this version), glued to the end of the bar who speaks only rarely.