The Time of Your Life

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This article is about the American play. For the British TV series, see The Time of Your Life (TV series).

The Time of Your Life, a five-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, who also starred as Joe, 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 in 1975 directed by Jack O'Brien. The play was made into an unsuccessful film in 1948, starring James Cagney as Joe and his sister Jeanne Cagney as Kitty Duval. The Time of Your Life has also been presented on television more than once, in 1958 for Playhouse 90 with Jackie Gleason as Joe and Jack Klugman as Nick, and in 1976 on PBS featuring a then-unknown Patti LuPone (as Kitty), Kevin Kline (as McCarthy, called a "blatherskite" in the program), and Nicolas Surovy as Joe.

The prologue of "The Time of Your Life" is used as the opening spoken word piece, guest-voiced by rapper MF Doom, on the eponymous album by the artist, Fog, [1].

The credits of "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" says parts of "The Time of Your Life" were used with permission, as the "fake" tattoos on Captain Jack's back and right arm included poetry from Saroyan.[citation needed]

In March 2008, on the 100th anniversary of Saroyan's birth, the play was performed at the Pacific Resident Theater in Venice, CA.