Taking on the Critics

It is always discouraging to read a “bad” review of good work, but it is doubly frustrating when the reviewer misses entirely the premise of a play, and therefore criticizes not the play itself but some other play that resides only in her imagination.

I saw “The Time of Your Life,” reviewed in Calendar Nov. 2 (“They’re Having Too Good a Time in This Staging of Saroyan Classic,” by Jana J. Monji), and found the play to reflect with great poetry, humor and imagination, the intent and spirit of the work as written by William Saroyan--a rejection of those aspects of contemporary life he considered to be life-deadening: soul-searing competitiveness, conformity (because there is nothing worth conforming to), the inability to love and to find simple joy.

Saroyan wrote that he wanted “to live creatively, to live honorably, to hurt no one as far as possible, to enjoy mortality, to fear neither death nor immortality, to cherish fools and failures even more than wise men and saints since there are more of them, to believe, to hope, to work and to do these things with humor. To say yes, and not to say no.”

The play I saw wonderfully fulfilled these aspirations.

RONALD RUBIN

Topanga

*

I too was present on opening night of “Haven” and was surprised and disappointed by Don Shirley’s review (“Real-Life Refugee Drama ‘Haven’ Is Changed to Fit Musical Mold,” Nov. 3). I found “Haven” to be a perfect blend of beautiful music and witty lyrics to bring to life a difficult time in American history. The anti-Semitism of the time and the challenges for Dr. Gruber were portrayed as realistic, not synthetic, and were never compromised for Broadway glitz.

LISA CHAIKEN

Beverly Hills