"A Writer in Every Sense of His Being"

Todd Wronski takes another bow as William Saroyan

September 9, 2008

Todd Wronski reprises his role as William Saroyan.

While the original 2001 production of In My Case An Exception Should Be Made: An Audience With William Saroyan marked the centenary of the birth of the award-winning playwright and novelist, Aug. 31 marked a return to Saroyan form for Professor of Theatre Todd Wronski.

Once again, Wronski embodied the author in the 75-minute, one-person play whose title comes from an epitaph Saroyan once suggested for himself: "I know that everyone has to die sometime, but I always thought an exception would be made in my case … what now?"

Wronski compiled and edited the performance text from hundreds of selections of Saroyan's public and private writing. The play features elements of Saroyan's Armenian heritage and his early experiences in the Fred Finch Orphanage, as well as his meteoric rise and fall as a literary light of the 1930s and '40s. Wronski chose Saroyan as a subject because "he catches a very nice sense of melancholy—the sense of sorrow and joy being intertwined and dependent on each other."

Wronski hopes audiences will see Saroyan as "a person who is a writer in every sense of his being, but also, alas, a writer—who in his own words—'made a fiasco of his life.' "

Following the Aug. 31 performance in the Cubiculo, Wronski traveled to California for a gala celebration performance at the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts Theatre to raise funds for the Saroyan Student Union of the American University of Armenia. From there he returns to Saroyan's hometown of Fresno, Calif., for a series of anniversary performances Sept. 7-11.