[The Time of Your Life] is set in a San Francisco waterfront honky-tonk, through which twenty-six strongly individualized persons pass, each one of whom expresses one facet of the character of mankind. Every man at some time in his life might be like Dudley, who lives for love; or like Wesley, who considers life a battle between himself and the machine; or like Harry, sick at heart, but wanting to make people laugh; or like McCarthy, the muscular longshoreman who is a philosopher; or like his friend, Krupp, who likes people and hates his duties as a policeman; or like Joe, who is trying to find the answers to life's problems; or, unfortunately, like Blick, whose meanness makes him hated by all; or like the other characters who enter the scene…. Each character of the play, isolated in some degree from every other one, is trying in his own way to discover how to live in a way that life may seem filled with delight. (p. 157)
In The Time of Your Life the only momentary suggestion of family life is made by the two-minute entrance of Nick's little daughter, and later, the walk-on entrance of his mother. The pleasure and pride which each of these two female characters evince toward Nick increase the sense of loneliness which pervades the characters who make use of the honky-tonk. The breath of family joy which blows upon Nick makes the atmosphere of his Entertainment Palace seem cold by comparison. The difficulty of "smiling to the infinite delight and mystery of life" is that each character is separated from the other by a wall of misunderstanding; yet a feeling of optimism pervades Nick's establishment from time to time and makes all the characters seem to be of the human family to which all mankind belongs.
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