[In the following essay, Radavich proposes that Saroyan's plays are reflective of the conflicts inherent in the inspiration for his dramatic landscape—the American West—and that they echo this tension by presenting characters that navigate between the romance and ideals and the unforgiving nature of reality and cultural conflict in the West.]

For some years now, William Saroyan's worldview has remained largely out of favor, despite the ongoing popularity of such works as The Time of Your Life and My Name Is Aram. In an America currently beset with deeply troubling patterns of violence, crime, and even terrorism, Saroyan's works have been regarded as too whimsical, optimistic, and willfully carefree to stay relevant to contemporary issues, his “quixotic brand of escapism and wish-fulfilment … no longer effective in a world desperately staving off annihilation” (Hewes 163). Yet Saroyan's worldview is less rosy than is often supposed. The major plays marking the famous “Saroyan period” (Block and Shedd 669) from 1939-42 in fact document a conspicuous darkening of mood and disillusionment. And his depiction of conflicting “Wests”—among them, the California of mind and fantasy as well as of harsh, unforgiving landscape—has become prescient now that we have reached the era of court battles over water rights, immigration, and the O. J. Simpson and Rodney King trials.

From the outset, the West portrayed in Saroyan's most famous and successful plays was multi-layered and conflicted. My Heart's in the Highlands, his first important play, lacks dramatic conflict in the conventional sense yet foregrounds the very real tension between the West of the mind, a fantasy concoction of longing, projection, and escape, and the inescapable realities of poverty, loneliness, and the desert climate of the San Joaquin Valley. Action shifts in The Time of Your Life to San Francisco, city of the Gold Rush and locus of romance and dreams, where characters must live in the fantasy West our culture has collectively created. Enacting the fantasy in practical terms presents its own real and troubling problems, which the characters attempt to negotiate with foghorns blaring in the background.

All of Saroyan's plays feature the West as both dream and swindle, yet nowhere is the huckster element more foregrounded than in Love's Old Sweet Song, where Barnaby Gaul, “pitchman,” hawks his “Five-Star Multi-Purpose Indian Remedy.” Also in this play, set in the lush climate of Bakersfield, Okies escaping the Dust Bowl of the Plains States, arrive in what is described as a “revolution” (48). The Beautiful People once again takes place in San Francisco, but the house is old and the fantasy seems faded and tired. By the time of Hello Out There, one of Saroyan's most satisfying and successful plays, the action has been relocated altogether—to the bleak environment, both social and natural, of Matador, Texas. The protagonist is imprisoned, and his vision of the ideal West has shrunk to a distant, unobtainable dream largely irrelevant to the struggle for survival.

This movement in the plays from a West of romantic longing to disturbing reality to unobtainable fantasy in the space of three short years parallels many of the dislocations of the historic West, albeit enacted over a larger canvas and for a longer time. All of Saroyan's key plays, with the exception of Hello Out There, feature a West that is deliberately, almost defiantly multi-cultural. This immigrant presence offers important insights into the mindset of the newly Americanized, their hopes, fears, and expectations, as well as tracing the inevitable collapse of idealism under the weight of harsh environmental and social conditions. Like Sam Shepard's work a half-century later, Saroyan's plays enact multiple, conflicting Wests that grow out of both historic realities and the hunger of the human heart.

My Heart's in the Highlands takes place in the arid, poverty-stricken landscape of Saroyan's native Fresno: “only a desolation of bleak land and red sky” (27). The year is 1914, which allows Saroyan to cast a nostalgic spell over the action while simultaneously alluding to the distant rumblings of World War I. The play makes us feel the palpable poverty of the immigrant population. Johnny, the nine-year-old dreamer figure, sits “dead to the world” and listens eagerly to a train whistle that “cries mournfully,” “trying to understand the meaning of the cry” (27). Since Johnny and his father have no money to pay the grocer, they steal grapes off the vine, and in the end they must vacate their house, leaving the furniture behind to cover three months of back rent. When a bugler named Jasper MacGregor arrives playing enchanting music, the entire neighborhood is transfixed by his visions of romance and possibility. MacGregor, like his mother in Tulsa and his grandmother in Vermont, has his “heart in the Highlands,” a magical place to evoke in this forbidding California locale.

MacGregor's Highlands, of course, signify Scotland and the Old World, where he started as a Shakespearean actor in 1851. But we can link MacGregor's romantic longings to conceptions of the frontier West, imbedded deeply in the American imagination. Saroyan aptly names one of his plays The Hungerers, which, though set in Manhattan, enacts “the hunger for immortality” and love (Razzle Dazzle 317). MacGregor, it turns out, has fled an Old Folks Home and is pursued by a Young Man who wants him to return to play King Lear in an amateur production. But MacGregor relishes too much his new role as savior: the neighbors and townspeople bring offerings of eggs, chickens, cheese, and fruit in a comic parable of the Gospel story of fishes and loaves. At the end of the play, this romancer dies reciting lines of Lear, returning to his imaginary Highland landscape and leaving Johnny and his father with literally no place to go.

The romantic vision of the Highlands, which many commentators have viewed as symbolizing Saroyan's optimistic escapism (see Three Plays 105-121), crumbles to dust when confronted with the relentless pressures of poverty and need. Johnny's father, who regards himself as a great poet, must face the rejection of his poems by The Atlantic Monthly and encourage his son to beg for food from Kosak, the grocer, and to steal produce from local farmers. Undeterred, Johnny's father offers his “finest poems” to Kosak, whose daughter Esther repays him with her secret cache of coins. Her beneficence enables Johnny and his father to leave for places unknown, even as Johnny utters the haunting last line of the play: “I'm not mentioning any names, Pa, but something's wrong somewhere” (104).

Despite all the magic and color of My Heart's in the Highlands, the tension feels palpable between the longed-for yet unattainable ideal, which, according to MacGregor, can only be experienced through death, and the unrelenting difficulties of quotidian western life. Already the West is at war with itself, once expectation butts against reality. In The Time of Your Life, however, action shifts to Nick's “Pacific Street Saloon, Restaurant, and Entertainment Palace at the foot of Embarcadero, in San Francisco” (18). Unlike My Heart's in the Highlands, this play is set against the back-drop of contemporary reality and focuses on the fulfilment (or nonfulfilment) of dreams in the very heart of Gold Rush longing. Saroyan also, for the first time, enacts elements of the Frontier Myth itself, adding an intertextual layering of satire and counterpoint.

As in My Heart's in the Highlands, the social constellation in The Time of Your Life is resolutely multi-cultural, including the Italian-American saloon-keeper and his Italian-speaking mother, an Arab whose refrain echoes throughout the play (“No foundation. All the way down the line”), a thin “colored boy who plays a mean and melancholy boogie-woogie piano” (17), and a Greek newspaper boy. The multi-culturalism extends out in both time and space, as the Arab hails from a place some five thousand miles away, and Willie belongs to an Assyrian culture that is “six or seven centuries old” (160).

Music and sound effects play an inordinately large role in this work, culminating in the highly ironic eruption of the marble machine, which sings “America” and salutes repeatedly with an American flag. Generally, Nick's Saloon and Entertainment Palace maintains an environment of warmth and ease, but the characters “can't feel at home anywhere else” (51) and spend their time drinking, philosophizing, and waiting. Hitler's war and revolution threaten more ominously and directly than the earlier World War in My Heart's in the Highlands, while the poverty seems less grinding and insistent. The issues of this play remain more clearly existential, concerning “what and what-not.” Kitty, the good-hearted prostitute, laments, “I don't like this life” (120), and Elsie claims, “Love is impossible in this world,” yet there is no escaping the world (133-34).

If My Heart's in the Highlands can be seen to enact the impoverished longing for romantic escape, The Time of Your Life focuses insistently on the accidental and happenstance. For that reason, it rejects dramatic conflict in the traditional sense, as the characters lack even the immigrant motivation to scramble and survive. Instead, the action emphasizes non-sequiturs and the absurd. Joe, the “patron saint” of the play, who always orders champagne and has a mysterious, never-ending supply of money, issues a series of purchase orders to Tom, his indentured side-kick servant, whose life he once saved. These orders include a variety of toys, a hired car, a huge quantity of chewing gum, and eventually a revolver. The prevailing mood of the play is one of confused purpose and repeated misdirection.

In Hello Out There, the protagonist, Photo-Finish, named for his knack for managing last minute escapes, articulates his distant, ideal vision of life in San Francisco, where “every night the fog-horns bawl” (379). As depicted in The Time of Your Life, however, actually living in that locus of western fantasy presents serious problems. The foghorns blare particularly during Act V and symbolize the “cloud of unknowing” that haunts the characters. Occasionally life seems to come genially together, as when the Arab plays harmonica, Wesley, the thin colored boy, tickles the piano keys, and Harry dances to the song (end of Act IV). But Krupp, “the waterfront cop who hates his job but doesn't know what to do instead” (17), utters a contrary refrain:

KRUPP:
There's no hope. … Why are we all so lousy?
This is a good world. … So why do they make all the trouble?
NICK:
I don't know. Why?
KRUPP:
We're crazy, that's why. We're no good any more. All the corruption everywhere.

(138)

Later in the play, after Joe has provided her a stylish wardrobe and a new place to stay at the upscale St. Francis Hotel, Kitty, the hooker with the heart of gold, laments, “It's what I've always wanted in my life, but it's too late” (179).

Perhaps the most intriguing ingredient in The Time of Your Life, from the perspective of western studies, is Kit Carson, old Indian-fighter and teller of tall tales, emblem of the mythic West in the midst of lost illusions. If evil remains largely outside Nick's haven of struggling outcasts, Carson's presence brings a refreshing breeze of myth into a community of the displaced. This icon of our national fantasy seems impervious to strikes and world wars, and he also carries out the largely sublimated desires of the other characters. Saroyan's dénouement is a masterpiece of narrativity: after killing Blick, the abusive police officer who harassed the establishment and beat young Wesley to the ground with his pearl-handled revolver, Carson concludes the play with his new tall tale, part of which we have witnessed:

I shot a man once. In San Francisco. Shot him two times. In 1939, I think it was. In October. Fellow named Blick or Glickor something like that. Couldn't stand the way he talked to ladies …

(193)

Considerable scholarly attention in recent years has centered on the mysterious character, Joe. Kenneth Rhoads regards Joe as a “Christ-Type” who “seems to be suspended between two worlds—those of the flesh and of the spirit” (108) and makes particularly insightful comments about Mary as an allusion to the biblical Marys (116). John A. Mills points out, aptly, Joe's role as “homme absurde” (134). Yet Wolcott Gibbs is surely on the right track in seeing Joe as some kind of God figure (qtd. in Rhoads 106). Unlike Christ, Joe goes through no clear sacrifice or redemption; instead, he seems like a divine puppet-master who dispenses favors and beneficence to a variety of characters, both financial resources and “gems” from his philosophy of human pathos. As such, he appears to be an ironic patron saint of Saroyanism: not the Indian-remedy salesman of Love's Old Sweet Song, nor the Scottish pied piper of dreams of My Heart's in the Highlands.

The taut ironies of The Time of Your Life keep the sentimentality in check and provide an ideological conflict between longing and skepticism. These very American characters, set up with high expectations by the myth of the West, must confront the fundamental impossibility of their unattainable desires. Saroyan's acausal, disoriented, prismatic stage portrait of American life, situated in the very core of expansionist western myth, suggests something essential and disturbing about our national psyche and character. Unlike other of his plays, The Time of Your Life offers the spectre of Saroyan—like Jean Antoine Houdon's famous sculpture of Voltaire—smiling ironically at hucksters, hookers, and drunkards gathered emblematically in that most mythic of western locales, the saloon, in the very heart of wish-fulfilment, San Francisco. The ongoing popularity of this play, which in 1983 was performed alongside Shakespeare in Stratford-on-Avon (Barter 28), derives in no small measure from its ironic investigation of western fantasy and fiction.

Saroyan's next major play, Love's Old Sweet Song, which opened almost immediately after The Time of Your Life at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, is less satisfying dramatically, yet it raises some fascinating social issues. For one thing, the good-natured scams of the earlier plays become much less benevolent and more self-conscious: one con artist squares off against another. Also, strikingly, a huge family of sixteen Okies overruns the central house, evoking both laughter and fear. We become much more aware of homeless people and refugees, who, in previous plays, were presented singly and often with romantic flair. Barnaby Gaul, the itinerant pitchman, tells Ann of his wanderings, “There were famines … years of hunger … There was hate …” (33-34).

If The Time of Your Life revels in the alcoholic stupor of individual longing and confusion, Love's Old Sweet Song makes us frighteningly aware of the animalistic. Georgie dismisses the Okies: “You people are mice” (57). They take over the house and yard, and wear Ann's clothes and jewels, eat her food. Just as they have been driven by dust and barrenness to California, they drive both Barnaby and Ann out of the house and refuse to leave. In a marvelous political jab, Saroyan has the Okies say, “We voted for FDR” (50). In this environment, the characteristically buoyant Saroyan assemblage has become decidedly corrosive, if still funny. Georgie calls Barnaby a tramp, “like everyone else around here” (65), but the text articulates some of the fine distinctions between tramps, migrant workers, and itinerant merchants, all of whom populate this disturbing play.

Love's Old Sweet Song starts off with a ruse. Georgie Americanus, the Greek telegram boy, delivers a false message promising Ann Hamilton a visit from a long-absent admirer. The landscape is lush, and romance hangs in the air. However, the newly arrived Barnaby is not the would-be romancer who purportedly sent the telegram. Moreover, he tells Ann of hardships, hunger, and war. Once the Okies arrive and take over the house, the play turns anti-romantic and chaotic. Although the police are sent for, clearly no legal force can oust this influx of the desperate. In a scene right out of vaudeville, a wandering Time magazine salesman named Windmore hawks his wares, only to be confronted by Barnaby Gaul, the Indian-Remedy salesman. It's huckster against huckster, with Barnaby identifying suddenly with the downtrodden Okies and alluding to Jesus, the Son of Man (83, 85).

In contrast to The Time of Your Life, San Francisco in this play is presented as a locus of corruption, and the social cohesiveness of Bakersfield has broken down. Two more shysters named Harris and Smith arrive, claiming they work for the “West Coast Novelty Amusement people” (we should remember that Nick's saloon in The Time of Your Life is, among other things, “an Entertainment Palace”). They seek to take local girls to San Francisco to work as “novelty people,” claiming that the girls will be “properly cared for, instructed, and protected from unsuitable companions” (96). In the local arena, law enforcement seems totally ineffectual. The county sheriff refuses to investigate what appears to be a murder, claiming, “I'm not big. And I'm not important. I'm a Republican” (102).

Among the more breath-taking elements of this play, which include a spectacular burning down of the house, Gaul frankly admits in both Act II and Act III that his identities have been fabricated: “I'm the man. Dr. Greatheart. A fraud. Barnaby Gaul. Never heard of Barnaby Gaul in my life. Who invented that incredible name?” (123). In stark contrast to the dreaming Jasper MacGregor of My Heart's in the Highlands and philosophizing Joe of The Time of Your Life, this man proclaims: “life is a poker game” (133). Fittingly, the play ends with card tricks and a renewed pitch for Dr. Greatheart's Five-Star Multi-Purpose Indian Remedy. But in case the audience might become too complacent in its assessment of this swindling variation of the Saroyan apostle, one of the Okies named Cabot enters claiming that the Dr. Greatheart's medicine saved his life. Barnaby proclaims himself “a missionary,” announces his real name, Jim, and tells Ann that the fake telegram of love “was the only message worth carrying” (140).

Thus Love's Old Sweet Song, a celebration of fraud, romance, and Dust-Bowl insurgence ends with a deconstructionist undercutting of the essential sincerity of the Frontier Myth. It remains Saroyan's most disturbing investigation of western themes, even as it fails to work entirely effectively as theatre. While Saroyan has been criticized for loose and carefree dramatic structure, in earlier plays the insouciance reflected a thematic significance and embodied important elements of frontier ideology. The tone and structure of Love's Old Sweet Song, by contrast, seem to wander out of control, partly due to the intractability of conflicting issues and values. Yet this play must be considered in any assessment of Saroyan's depiction of the West, particularly to counter the facile charge that his characters and thought suffer from being overly sanguine or romantic.

The Beautiful People, Saroyan's next full-length play, performed in 1941, represents a fanciful counterpart to Love's Old Sweet Song and includes few identifiable western elements, violating Tuska's dictum that “the land must be a character, and beyond that, the land must influence the characters, physically and spiritually” (1). Set in an old house at the top of a hill in the Sunset District of San Francisco, the play seems like a caricature of Saroyanism; it lacks even the ideological tensions of earlier plays, emerging instead as a Sermon on the Saroyanist Mount. Indeed, in this his most overtly religious play, biblical references and parables abound, from the nicknaming of Owen's sister as “St. Agnes of the Mice” to the arrival of Father Hogan, who sits at the metaphorical feet of Jonah, to learn the Saroyanist doctrine. It is not satisfying theatre because it denies all opposition and counter-example, and its action takes place apart from all reality, but The Beautiful People does present Saroyan's philosophy in the baldest of ways and hints at the ideological crisis to come.

Mice serve as the recurring symbol of this play, derived in part from Robert Burns' poem, “To a Mouse.” Other references to Burns surface (for instance, to “Auld Lang Syne”), but the symbolism of mice spreads out in surprising, and ultimately contradictory, ways. On the one hand, mice serve as an object of worship. Agnes, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the household, worships them and won't let Owen, her younger brother, set out any mouse-traps. Indeed, Owen arranges flowers in the form of her name, claiming the mice have left her their own message. After encountering a young man at the Public Library she feels drawn to and whom she fears she might never see again, Agnes announces that one of the housemice has become lost. The overt tie to the Gospel parable of the Lost Sheep radiates out to include both Agnes herself, “with her faith in mice grew her faith in herself” (86), and also the young man she longs to, and finally does, find. Later, Jonah, the father of the household and the play's raisonneur, articulates the essence of this symbolic reasoning: “the image of the living heart's shyest, most kind smile. … The absence of their brother has taught them—and myself, too—the preciousness of one another” (91).

On the other hand, in a manner reminiscent of Love's Old Sweet Song, mice represent small-mindedness and the mass of faceless, desperate humanity elsewhere in the play. The Webster family has lived for seven years off the pension of one Wilbur M. Stonehedge, who previously lived in the same house and passed away. Like Johnny's father in My Heart's in the Highlands, Jonah doesn't believe this is stealing from others because “each month we have sent the money back, spending it” (89). When Prim, the aptly named vice-president of the pension company, arrives with legal papers and a copy of the Stonehedge obituary, announcing an impending halt to the illegal payments, Dan denounces him as “a little mouse of a man” who will be “the ruin of the race” (76). No redemption is allowed this particular “mouse” until he converts in the next scene to the prevailing Saroyanist philosophy.

Apart from the radical inconsistency of the signification of mice as both lost soul and small-minded oppressor, such blatant disregard for the realities of work and earning money point up a serious flaw in Saroyan's worldview that did not surface fully in previous plays. Poverty and need seem palpable in My Heart's in the Highlands, and if Joe's mysteriously acquired bounty showers blessings on the characters in The Time of Your Life, Jonah's genial fraud in The Beautiful People suggests Saroyan's unwillingness to accept the reality and legitimacy of financial concerns. The eldest brother Harold wants to make a million dollars so he can “put it in a big truck, drive around the town and throw it away” (24). Prim, who could and should serve as the antagonist in the play, the voice of everyday concerns, arrives to announce the discontinuation of illegal pension funds, but no mention is ever made of fraud, punishment, or restitution. In fact, the play appears to advocate the right of Saroyanesque “beautiful people” to live off the hard work and proceeds of others.

Thus, the vice-president of the pension company, representing the Real World, does not confront the beautiful people but becomes immediately converted to their romantic escapism, literally fainting when the newly adopted family mouse, found by Owen “up in the steeple of the church,” runs through his clothes. The next scene shows Prim having enjoyed a pleasant dinner with the family and planning to increase substantially the monthly payments. This miraculous conversion may seem fitting in a play in which Jonah insists that his “church is the whole blooming universe, and mice are as much a part of its magnificence as men, if they only knew” (88). Nonetheless, this fundamentally undramatic posture obviates all theatrical tension, making the play seem an indulgent exercise in precious solipsism and thereby giving cannon-fodder to Saroyan's critics and detractors.

Perhaps the insistent fancifulness can be forgiven if The Beautiful People is regarded as a last-ditch attempt, through determined effort of the romantic imagination, to stave off ideological collapse. Early in the play, articulations of impending breakdown abound. Owen, the fifteen-year-old youngest son, declares himself a failure: “It's the truth. No education, no social contacts, no political affiliations. I just loaf” (12). He announces that he is “opposed to work” and, while not a Communist, “believes in freedom of freedom” (14). Owen represents the not-yet-fallen prototype of the failed dreamer later seen in Hello Out There. He has lost money gambling on horses; his horse, Tree, loses in a “photo-finish,” foreshadowing the name of the protagonist in the later play. Owen also declares his father a failure. But his most serious enunciation of impending decline comes early in Act I, scene 2:

Things end. They change. They spoil. They're hurt. Or destroyed. Accidents happen … sooner or later everybody's got to know that death is with us from the first breath we take.

(40)

The Beautiful People fails to pursue this thread of disintegration, ending instead on a fanciful, and rather forced, note of optimism and social harmony. It remained for Saroyan's final major play of the period, Hello Out There, to deal with more serious issues. This one-act play, taut and finely balanced, differs markedly in mood and structure and features a clearly defined conflict between what the author posits as good and evil. As The Beautiful People attests, Saroyan felt uncomfortable labeling anyone as evil; in the “Preface” to Love's Old Sweet Song, he finds “the tenderest or strongest emotions of a man inextricable from everything else that is a man's …” (5-6). Yet Hello Out There provides his strongest dramatic portrait of evil, which in this case grows out of narrow-mindedness, fear, and barren isolation. The options for escape remain tantalizingly out of reach, making this work Saroyan's darkest investigation of western themes.

Unlike the earlier plays set in California, Hello Out There takes place in Matador, Texas, and entirely indoors—indeed, in and around a single jail cell. The theme is imprisonment, psychological as well as physical, and though we never see the landscape, the social environment of the town appears cramped and barren. The Girl's father, who lives on what seems to be illegitimate government relief, appropriates for himself his daughter's meager earnings from working at the jail. The townspeople described to us hang out in bars and gather in gangs to try to escape an essential loneliness. In this play, the romantic ideal of San Francisco has shrunk to a few short speeches; the two principals long to escape to “where people love somebody,” but the Young Man dies in the cell, and we are by no means convinced that the Girl can escape this restrictive Texas town.

The California dreamer in Hello Out There, in contrast to earlier manifestations, is not merely a stranger but also the protagonist whose quest drives the action. His character shifts before our eyes, from a con artist who seems to have caught up with his destiny after allegedly raping a local woman, to an innocent outsider betrayed and victimized by a paranoid, hypocritical small town. The revelations open up gradually, as we come to learn the Young Man's nickname, Photo-Finish, and to listen to his dreams of a life of romance and belonging. The Girl he befriends is also gradually revealed, first as Emily, victim of small-town narrow-mindedness that has stunted her emotional growth, then subsequently re-christened as Katey, Photo-Finish's pupil in the art of dreaming and self-realization.

This play features Saroyan's most head-on confrontation between conflicting Wests: the unrealizable, haunting dream of unrestricted love and liberty versus vigilante justice and self-willed authority. Guns and violence permeate all of Saroyan's major plays of this period, but Kit Carson's murder of Blick at the end of The Time of Your Life takes place off stage, with a pearl-handled revolver thrown subsequently into the bay, and with the collective consent of both the characters and the audience. The anarchic arson of Love's Old Sweet Song is frightening but ultimately dispassionate, and Cabot, the Okie thought murdered behind the house, reappears, miraculously cured by the Indian Remedy. In Hello Out There, evil wins when right in front of our eyes, the fearful husband, who realizes his wife may have falsely accused the Young Man, shoots to protect his shaky masculine image among peers and associates. The tone is sharply realistic, and Saroyan does not sugar-coat the words of the sexually frustrated wife, who arrives at the end saying, “Yeah, that's him … Listen to the little slut, will you?” (386-87).

Although many of Saroyan's plays have been labeled “existentialist,” principally The Time of Your Life, Hello Out There seems most deserving of the term from a Sartrian perspective. This emerges as very much a teaching play, a play of ideological engagement, in which Photo-Finish inducts the newly re-christened Katey into his world of romance and pursuit of fulfilment. In contrast to the rigid social strictures and regimented thinking of Matador, Photo-Finish wants Katey to expand her horizons, to realize her own beauty, goodness, and potential, and to escape the bars of her immediate environment. At the outset, the Young Man focuses on himself and his own desire for escape. Midway through, recognizing his dire predicament, he gives Katey his money, pleading for her to escape to Frisco on her own. This courtly act of generosity, combined with a chaste kiss, belies our earlier impressions of a classic western escape artist with a fast-talking line. He leaves Katey as a teacher leaves a pupil, armed with new knowledge to face a challenging world.

The end of Hello Out There is interestingly ambiguous. Katey tries, unsuccessfully, to rescue the Young Man's body from the vigilante townspeople and lingers alone, “no longer sobbing.” The stage directions specify that she “looks around at everything, then looks straight out,” and whispers the very words the Young Man uttered at the opening of the play: “Hello—out—there! Hello—out there!” (387). This coyote-like refrain has woven in and out of the play, taking on a variety of colors, associations, and moods. Katey's final articulation represents an absorption of the master's teaching; it can be spoken either poignantly, as a symptom of ongoing human entrapment, or defiantly, as a indication that Photo-Finish has enabled a disciple to transcend her debilitating surroundings. The actress's placement inside or outside the cell bars underscores these significations.

This tightly constructed one-act play brings full circle the conflict between fantasy and reality first articulated in My Heart's in the Highlands. But the nostalgic, if troubled, romanticism of the earlier play, set in 1914 and derived from an earlier short story, has given way to a much harsher depiction of where the romanticized West fits in, or doesn't fit in, to actual political experience. The mythic California portrayed in Hello Out There stands in clear danger of extinction; the ambiguous ending suggests but by no means guarantees that one person will be left alive with the tattered, faraway dream intact. And for the Girl, the fantasy of “loving somebody” in Frisco is even more remote than for Photo-Finish: whereas he has experienced the dream and lost it (through gambling and bad luck), she has never witnessed it first-hand except in the words of a jailed refugee, desperate and alone.

So what can be said, finally, of Saroyan's variety of “Wests”? His rich dramatic portraiture of western themes includes a number of key ideas:

1. The mythic West of romance, harmonious nature, individual freedom, is powerful and satisfying emotionally, but remains fundamentally unstable, disorienting, and out of reach.

2. The mythic West sustains the human spirit under harsh, lonely, unforgiving circumstances but remains at odds with poverty and an arid environment as well as with narrow-mindedness and bigotry.

3. The mythic West is essentially multi-cultural, like Steinbeck's, but relatively untroubled by cultural clashes and misunderstandings.

4. Built into the notion of California and the West are both dream and swindle, idealism and fraud, including self-swindling (pretending to believe the scam and to enact oneself in it), which are inter-penetrating and inseparable.

Saroyan's ultimate response to the West at war with itself, as reality and as ideology, involves what could be called a willed optimism and sense of human community. In the “Preface” to Love's Old Sweet Song, he professes,

It is impossible for me not to be sophisticated. It is impossible for me not to be naïve … I must assume that naïveté and sophistication are simultaneous in everybody.

(7)

The dynamic tension between ideal West and real West creates the psychic canvas on which Saroyan's characters draw their lives and articulate their experiences.

Although over half a century has now passed, the ideological conflicts at the heart of Saroyan's dramatic works are more relevant today than at the time he conceived them. California struggles to maintain its sense of coherence and identity, even as thousands have left the state in past decades to virgin areas of Colorado, Idaho, and elsewhere in the mountain West. Michael Elliott's Newsweek piece “The West at war” and a series of articles in California Journal with titles like “Is it too late to save California?” suggest a growing sense of panic about the fate of the idealized West in our time (Knudson). “Culture wars are taking place in the Mountain States between ranchers and miners and affluent newcomers and between militias and federal regulators” (Elliot 24).

Colorado's population … has grown by nearly 100,000 in each of the past three years … Cities have bulged out over their supposed boundaries.

(“Unlonely” A33)

A host of propositions attempting to limit growth and immigration and to regulate state social policy have been voted into effect in recent years, often as hasty reaction to problems that seem out of control, or to prevent “Californication.” In “True West: relocating the horizon of the American frontier,” Richard Rodriguez' cover story in the September 1996 issue of Harper's Magazine, a

florid, balding gymnopaede bellows to me from an adjacent Stair-Master in San Francisco that he is abandoning California … He is moving out West … to a house thirty minutes from downtown Boise where there are still trees and sky.

(40)

The boundaries of the West are changing, as contemporary residents fear, justifiably, that their dream—the High Dream of the American West, for which many sought gold, escape, renewal, and redemption—may indeed have been a fraud all along.

Stage denizens of Saroyan's multi-cultural West, battling to overcome isolation, harsh landscape, and narrow-minded limitations, offer an instructive and enlightening perspective on a region that from the beginning has labored under its own demands and destiny. Just as the fantasy of a place where people “love somebody” and seem “alive and halfway human” fades in Hello Out There, contemporary westerners struggle to keep the region's great virgin promise alive. Saroyan, the first major California dramatist, enacts this struggle decades ahead of his time. His plays have been often criticized for having loose structure and indulging in idle dreams. But his dramatic conflict resides largely in the mind: between human wish and hard fact, garden fantasy and arid emptiness. It is a battle inherent in the very notion of the West, a mental landscape we have constructed against all that we hope to escape and cannot, attempting to reconcile the sins we commit in order to pursue freedom and renewal. Saroyan's characters endeavor to survive with some joy and humanity under the strictures and contradictions of the American Frontier.

Works Cited

Barter, Alice K. “Introduction: Saroyan and His Critics.” Keyishian 1-34.

Block, Haskell M., and Robert G. Shedd, eds. Masters of Modern Drama. New York: Random House, 1962.

Elliot, Michael. “The West at war.” Newsweek 126:3 (17 July 1995): 24-29.

Keyishian, Harry, ed. Critical Essays on William Saroyan. New York: G.K. Hall, 1995.

Knudson, Tom. “Is it too late to save California.” California Journal 26:4 (April 1995): 18-22.

Mills, John A. “‘What. What-not.’: Absurdity in Saroyan's The Time of Your Life.” Keyishian 134-147.

Rhoads, Kenneth W. “Joe as Christ-Type in Saroyan's The Time of Your Life.” Keyishian 105-123.

Rodriguez, Richard. “True West: relocating the horizon of the American frontier.” Harper's Magazine 293:1756 (Sept. 1996): 37-47.

Saroyan, William. The Beautiful People. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941.

———. Hello Out There. In Razzle-Dazzle. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942.

———. Love's Old Sweet Song. In Three Plays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940.

———. My Heart's in the Highlands. In Three Plays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940.

———. Razzle-Dazzle. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942.

———. The Time of Your Life. In Three Plays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940.

Tuska, John. The American West in Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988.

“Unlonely spaces: the crowded West.” The Economist (London) 334 (25 March 1995): A32-34.