Last Two Plays of Wiliam Saroyan, The
Warsaw Visitor & Tales From the Vienna Streets

Written in the summer of 1980, the last summer of Saroyan's life, Warsaw Visitor and Tales from the Vienna Streets are Saroyan's ultimate statements for the stage. Inspired by recent visits to Warsaw and Vienna and shadowed by the symptoms of terminal cancer, the themes of these last two plays are vast, possibly the broadest in scope of any of Saroyan's works. Staggering achievements both of them, and the clue to each is the character of the city in which the play is laid. Warsaw, pulling back from Russia and alien to Western Europe, is a city set apart, in isolation. Similarly Saroyan, isolated by the immanence of death and confronted by his private devil, comes to grips like Warsaw with the deepest implications of solitude and survival. "" Vienna, ""settled dead center in the heart of all the great cities of the world,'' finds Saroyan there as Everyman, a minority of one, like all of us everywhere, sharing with our private devil the guilt and innocence of humankind. In Warsaw Visitor the individual prevails in the face of death, the Dying Old Man on the Flying Trapeze leaps off into the unknown one final time, open-eyed and unafraid. In Tales from the Vienna Streets all humankind, creative and striving, dies and yet lives on to create and strive again, open-eyed and unafraid. ""The play goes on,"" Saroyan tells us, for him, and them, and all of us.