Happy Birthday Wanda June by Kurt Vonnegut, directed by Jeff Wise for Wheelhouse Theatre Company at the Duke on 42nd Street, New York, through November 29, 2018.
The novelist Kurt Vonnegut is not remembered for his plays, but this is a doozy. Happy Birthday Wanda June is a satirical 1970 theatrical comedy by the author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
Vonnegut based his protagonist on Homer’s Ulysses, a war hero who returns home after an absence of many years to his wife and son. Penelope is a stereotypical housewife who waited patiently but is being courted by a vacuum cleaner salesman and by a pacifist physician who’s described by the 12-year-old son as a “fairy.” The boy clearly idolizes his missing father, who was presumed to be dead.
The author served in the U.S. army in World War II and was captured by the Nazis. He was incarcerated as a POW in Dresden. On February 13, 1945, British and American bombers destroyed the German city by dropping incendiary bombs. The resulting firestorm killed at least 25,000 but Vonnegut survived because he was housed underground in a former meat locker and slaughterhouse.
It’s too simple to label this an anti-war play, because it attacks all manifestations of male entitlement. This superb production directed by Jeff Wise adds two vaudevillian musical numbers that aren’t in Vonnegut’s script. The title of the 1950s love song “You Belong to Me” indicates how apt is the director’s choice. The music fits right in with the outlandish plot.
Ulysses (or Odysseus) is reincarnated as Harold Ryan, played with growling ferociousness by Jason O’Connell. He snarls and he rants, displaying the ridiculous nature of his cocky attitude as he tries to re-establish a dictatorship in his home. The character is many worlds away from the virtuous Ulysses that we remember from our high school literature classes. The abandoned Penelope is the absurdly docile Kate MacCluggage, on her way to learning a new way of life.
The character of Wanda June actually is peripheral. She is a young girl who was run over and killed by an ice cream truck before she could celebrate her birthday. Charlotte Wise (the director’s daughter) and Brie Zimmer alternate in that role. Matt Harrington, Kareem Lucas, Finn Faulconer and Craig Wesley Divino nicely complete the cast.
Vonnegut’s play infuriates some hawkish critics. To be sure, some of Vonnegut’s points are extreme, as when he ridicules the airmen who dropped an atomic bomb on Japan. Those pilots sincerely believed they were shortening the war and ultimately saving American and Japanese lives. But some ideologues (like the critic at The National Review) say that Vonnegut abhorred masculinity — “In Vonnegut’s eyes, the more masculine you are, the more sinister” — whereas they believe that unrestrained machismo is what makes America “exceptional” and great.
Actually, what the script targets is the bellicose aggressiveness that led America into the costly Vietnam War. That attitude is rampant again in 2018, but this production goes out of its way to avoid targeting Donald Trump. Its central character is a primitive, animalistic brute but doesn’t use any Trump mannerisms. That makes the play’s message more universal.
The inside of the Duke Theatre is appropriately decorated by Brittany Vasta with stuffed heads of big game mounted on the walls. The lobby features art works by Vonnegut. His readers may not be aware that he had that talent, but when I met him it was at the opening of such an exhibition at a gallery in Boston in the 1990s.