Vonnegut lacerates American masculinity using a Hemingway-esque figure at the center is interesting for the time but not sure if it knows what it wants to be (a memory play or a critique of Vietnam?)

I was glad I had read the introduction to the play before I read the actual script. I very much like the idea of a retelling of Odysseus' homecoming from a less heroic perspective. That said, the play felt fairly amateur. The characters were pretty flat and not a lot gets resolved. Also it feels really hung up in the era it was written.

Harold Ryan, war hero and big game hunter, has been missing, presumed dead, for eight years. In his absence, his wife Penelope and his son Paul have moved on with their lives. Penelope is engaged to a doctor, and Paul wants to be just like him. And then Harold returns, on his birthday, to find a cake on the kitchen table, that says “Happy Birthday, Wanda June.”

Who the hell is Wanda June?

Harold’s reappearance brings the return of his inflated ego, as well as his insistence that everything be exactly as he wants it. He’s unprepared for what his wife and son do in response.

This is Vonnegut’s first play. It was only performed once, and while it didn’t get the best reviews, it’s vintage Kurt. We all know he’s an expert at pointing out the absurdities of life. In this one, he satirizes something that’s seen something of a rise in recent years: toxic masculinity. He does it a way that only he could do, and it’s funny, odd, and told in a way that makes us both laugh and cringe at ourselves.

I never knew that Kurt Vonnegut had two plays in his repertoire... but after reading Casey Sherman’s Helltown (see my Goodreads review of that, as well – it was excellent!) where he describes the opening of Wanda June on Broadway while Vonnegut was going through a divorce and doing a pavement-pounding investigation of a man that may have dated his daughter before going on to be Cape Cod’s most notorious serial killer, I had to pick it up.

After picking it up, I decided I had to stage it - and I will be this December in Central Massachusetts.

“At least you’ve got a place to come back to. I don’t have a place to come back to anymore... I used to really love that Alice. Do you know that?” / “You know her for what she is now-garbage.”

Happy Birthday, Wanda June is a play about toxic masculinity wrapped in a retelling of Odysseus’ homecoming to Penelope from the Odyssey. It is mainly about Penelope who hasn’t seen her husband in years as he has gone hunting and to war at all corners of the world, killing people, animals, scavenging trophies, and collecting so many diamonds with his friend Looseleaf that they are now set for life. But while he was gone, Penelope had him declared legally dead, their marriage dissolved, and she is dating two losers – a doctor who is kind of a hippie and a vacuum salesman that everyone is convinced is gay. We learn she is engaged to marry the doctor when, you guessed it, her husband arrives home. Simultaneously, we learn of two side stories told by three characters reporting to us from heaven: Wanda June, a girl who was killed by a drunk ice cream truck driver on her birthday, and von Koningswald, a Nazi German officer that the husband famously killed in a bar. They are in heaven having a great time playing shuffleboard all day with the likes of Harold Ryan’s ex wife and their other best friends: Albert Einstein, Jesus Christ, Judas Iscariot, Adolf Hitler, and other notable historic figures.

“Nevermind the condition of your body and your spirit! Look after your things, your things!”

Of course, hilarity ensues once the juxtaposition of what it means to be a man and woman is on full display, mostly because the play is set in the Nixon era where the forefront of people’s minds was focused on communism and the Vietnam war, the women's rights movement, and a handful of other huge disruptions to the way things had always been done in America. There is no question that issues of possession and materialism of living things, violence, and identity are central to this piece, and what is so interesting is how many of the references regardless of the original intent remain relevant: women’s rights have just recently been in jeopardy once more, Russia and China are still relevant foes, and the roles of men and women in relationship and their boundaries have changed in newer more pervasive ways but the play doesn’t have to. It’s all still here.

“You’re hollow, like a woman.”

This is a play that is as spectacular as it is funny and bizarre. Its short Broadway run is not very surprising and I am certain it lost a lot of money, but I am looking forward to breathing some new life into it with my actors on my stage. I have already cast many of the men's roles with women playing the parts to add a little more magnetic and subversive approach toward casting the roles, and they are loving the script and completely get its strange Vonnegutian fantasy and wit. I am looking forward to seeing how they come together to make some fantastic art that turns the mirror back toward the irrational, strange world we live in as we wonder... have we truly made any progress at all fifty years on?

Might as well laugh about it, right?

So it goes.

I have read a lot of Vonnegut but it took me quite a while to get round to seeking this out. The consensus is that Vonnegut was a much better novelist than a playwright, but I enjoyed reading this satire anyway. The main character is based on Ernest Hemingway at his worst, a macho pontificator for whom compassion is weakness. The story unfolds in a pleasingly oblique and witty manner. It would be interesting to see how it works on the stage but I don't suppose I am likely to get the chance.

there's something about kurt vonnegut's works that enchants me and leaves me beaten up after i'm done with yet another piece of writing by him.
as the author mentions, it's impossible to tell who is right and who is wrong because in their mind they're all right. as a reader, i for sure sympathized with some characters and some i hated to the core. however, the doubt placed in my mind at the beginning of the play, made it harder to judge everyone (maybe besides harold, because f*ck him). i loved to see that everyone was flawed, it makes it realistic. the dark humour, even though it turns the play into a caricature, fits the concept like a glove.
the plays covers themes common for vonnegut to explore, but still relevant and always with a new perspective on a subject. the play could be described as a study of masculinity, feminism, war, america and so so much more.
i don't even know what else to say. at times i feel like i'm too stupid to fully comprehend vonnegut's works, so if i'm talking bullshit: ignore me

While this was one of Vonnegut's 'lesser' works in his own estimation, I still really enjoyed it. Feels as relevant today as it was when written: we are still in the process of replacing the Harold Ryans of the world with a kinder, gentler sort of person. We probably always will be.

A short and sweet stage full of buffoons, each man idiotic in his own way, ultimately bent on being a hero. Harold is a vestige of a war-torn time and so he seems incredibly convoluted and asinine in this era. Woodly is of the new, but he still can’t overcome the urge to fight and be fought, to bear witness to his hubris, even if it’s small in stature compared to Harold. One meant to replace the other, but in the end they both lose out on the love of Penelope and it becomes obvious that everything these men touch, and men like them touch, turns to death and decay. The king is dead. Long love the king. Until the apish king comes to its actual end.

3.5 stars actually. It was bizarre but silly/fun and felt like it held a deeper meaning in sort of an irrelevant way!

Vonnegut is awesome, but plays are not his thing. Stick to his novels.

Was this a happy coincidence or something else entirely, that I started this one after coming off of (re)reading "The Old Man and the Sea," by Hemingway, about a different hunt entirely? There's a great letter in the appendix entitled "On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter" (1936), the impetus for which was a discussion between Hemingway and one of his hunter friends, who, it appears, like the character General Zaroff in Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game," has become bored with the rather mundane hunting of helpless creatures (more or less), favoring instead only driven-elephant hunting, whereby he experiences the thrill of the hunt only when being charged by a seven-ton beast seeking to run him over. Hemingway says that "to him there is no sport in anything unless there is great danger and, if the danger is not enough, he will increase it for his own satisfaction."

I could proffer here my own interpretation of this person's, well, over-compensatory compulsions, but I'll leave that alone! What follows is Hemingway's fishing philosophy, specifically that there is danger aplenty in being on the sea, fishing or not, but that the thrill was in the unknowing: "in hunting you know what you are after... but who can say what you will hook sometime when drifting in a hundred and fifty fathoms in the Gulf Stream." There are different kinds of thrills, I suppose, and satisfactions, too.

Anywho: in any event, Kurt clearly didn't approve, as he demonstrates in his first play, "Wanda June." He said as much, in fact, when, he surprisingly discussed Hemingway's hunting (!), which he found distasteful, at the least. This rather irreverent play apparent began its life as "Penelope," inspired by the Odyssey, where the hero's ever-faithful wife, even after she has no reason to expect that he's still alive, having gone off to war, wards off a steady string of suitors who wish to supplant her husband. Kurt clearly doesn't see Odysseus as a hero, however, writing that he envisioned him as "a lot like that part of Hemingway which I detested - the slayer of nearly extinct animals which meant him no harm." Slayer of men, too, in Kurt's view: killing is killing, and those who enjoy the hunting of animals also usually see glory in the deaths of men. It appears that Hemingway's specter - or that of the heroic masculine ideal, at least, looms at least a little if not large in this work, as well.

As the dialogue is quite minimal, I kept asking myself, "what's this about?" I think Kurt said it best, so everyone else could understand it, is in the opening, which says, "this is a simple-minded play about men who enjoy killing, and those who don't." Essentially, it's his opposition to books by and about Hemingway-esque figures, who celebrate killing as the ultimate act of masculinity. The central character is Penelope, the wife of Harold Ryan, a big-game hunter and soldier-adventurer who claims to have killed two hundred men men, who has been lost in the Amazon jungle and presumed dead for eight years. He finally makes it back, with sidekick Colonel Harper, who it is said dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Unlike the Homeric Penelope, however, Harold's wife has been cavorting with not one but two men in his absence, a former-test-pilot-turned insurance salesman named Shuttle, and a hippie doctor, Dr. Woodly, who, as it turns out, is now Penelope's fiance, much to the chagrin of their young son, Paul, who worships the father he's never known solely on account of the epic tales of his exploits and the remnants of them: the taxidermy animals which litter their apartment.

Hilarity and farce ensues when Harold returns home, unannounced, to find that the world he left nearly a decade prior has changed much for the worse: Harold believes that the US has become castrated, weak, and all its traditional, rugged heroes have been supplanted by the type of effeminate men his wife has been entertaining. Harold laments that there is no enemy left to conquer. I don't really get where Wanda June comes in: she's a ten-year-old who was run over by an ice cream truck, and now lives in heaven with another colorful cast of characters, including Major von Konigswald, the Beast of Yugoslavia, one of Harold's victims, as well as one of Harold's former wives who drank herself to death. It seems that things are pretty tranquil in heaven, too: everyone just hangs around and plays shuffleboard. Apparently there were several versions of the play with alternate endings, but this one has a disillusioned Harold attempting suicide, ala Hemingway himself... but he can't pull it off.

The play opened in New York in 1971, and ran for about a hundred performances. It's since been reworked as an opera, which debuted at Butler University in 2016, and was revived as an Off-Off-Broadway production in 2018. Definitely not one of my favorites, but it was a curious coincidence that I read this just after finishing what is widely considered as the best of Hemingway's works and one of the most iconic works of American literature of all time. Go figure.

3.5. Or maybe 4, I don’t know. Read it in 3 tube rides. Didn’t realize this was a play, and I’m usually pretty bad at reading plays, so that may have marred it for me a little.

But on the whole, it remains very true to the Vonnegut style: funny, super odd, and saying something about war and the violence humans inflict on other humans.