7/24/2014

Vonnegut Book Club Notes for July 24, 2014

A cool summer day brought out nine of us to discuss KV’s only published play “Happy Birthday, Wanda June.” John Hawn, Bill Briscoe, Karen Lystra, Celia Latz, Bob Marks, Fritz Hadley, Jay Carr, and Dave Young were expertly led through the script by John Sturman. Afterwards, almost all of us adjourned to the Bluebeard Restaurant to continue to chew through the script and dispose of a decent lunch.

Vonnegut, how could you! We were blindsided as we tooled through our discussion of “Wanda June” this morning. We had just mentioned the defenestration of Dr. Norbert Woodley when one of our august members complained that he didn’t understand the ending. It turned out that his 1971 script had an entirely different ending, with no window-chucking, than the 1984 script that most of us had purchased. We were discussing different versions of the same work. What obligation does a writer have to present us with a definitive version of a particular work? If a visual artist turns out various versions of the same subject, he can sell them all as a series or as a studies and no one complains. But it seems to be a dirty trick for some one to mess with our minds with multiple print versions of the same story. Was it re-written because the Vietnam War was finally over or had KV had some new insight he wanted to share with us? We will probably never know.

KV was riding high when the play was first produced in NYC in October, 1970. He had recently moved to Manhattan and was bathing in his new found celebrity following the success of “Slaughterhouse Five.” The war in Viet Nam was weighing everyone down and KV, perhaps wanting to take a break from the labor of novel writing, had something to say about violence. He modeled his protagonist on Ulysses who, in the Homeric version, was returning home to Ithica and his wife Penelope after twenty years of fighting the Trojans and various fiends who interrupted the voyage home. KV’s Harold Ryan, an old soldier and white hunter, came home to his Penelope after only eight years of wandering around in the African bush after a plane crash. He was relatively restrained in disposing of his wife’s lovers. Ryan, who was eerily similar to Ernest Hemingway, represents the dying machismo of the first half of the 20th Century. His credo was “Death before Dishonor” and he would never understand a country whose young men were saying “I would rather let my country die for me.”

John read us some reviews from 1971 and 1983 – when the play was restaged. Clive Barnes and Walter Kerr found much to like in the play despite its many flaws. Both praised KV’s originality and imagination. KV seemed to be riding on the wave of “Slaughterhouse Five.” The reviews in 1983 were more tepid despite years of polishing. Many of us thought that KV’s characters in the play were cartoonish, undeveloped. Perhaps KV had some difficulty in making the transition from novels to plays. “Wanda June” is an absurdist, existential work and with such an art form it is often difficult for the reader (audience) to connect with the characters. Reading a play can be informative, but seeing a play can be more entertaining. Costumes, stagecraft, music, slapstick and so forth adds dimensions you don’t get on the printed page. Talented actors can breathe life into an otherwise dead script. KV’s language is a bland meal; adequate but not rich and powerful. It is his wit, not his poetry, that turns the page. What could be more absurd than the thought of little Wanda June and Hitler playing shuffleboard in Heaven?

There is a lot of anger in this play. Harold Ryan is very linear in his blatant hyper-masculinity. However, his Penelope (unlike the Penelope married to Ulysses) is not compliant, not afraid of him. Harold is angry because the world has changed and his sense of honor has become archaic and meaningless in a world of peaceniks. It also seems that KV is venting his anger at Ernest Hemingway, ten years dead at the time the play is produced. Fame and wealth came to Hemingway at an early age while KV struggled for decades to achieve moderate success. The sometime Saab salesman and dutiful father of seven must have envied the globe-trotting Papa who sought out adventure everywhere while self-medicating his broken bones with alcohol.

We had planned to discuss a second play “Make Up Your Mind” but it was not available in time for our meeting so we will take a run at it in our August meeting. KV was never able to finish the play and there are a reported sixteen or so versions out in various manuscripts.
There were a few public readings of the play, but it was never produced in KV’s lifetime. Nicky Silver, an accomplished playwright, did try to mash together a version for the Speakeasy Stage Company in Boston. The world premier opened in October, 2013 to universally disastrous reviews. One reviewer likened it to a pointless Saturday Night Live skit that went on for ninety minutes. Anyway, our diligent KVML staff has dickered with Silver (or his agents) and photocopies of the script are now available in the Library bookstore for $9 and change. Since the play is considered a “work-in-progress” the nine bucks only gets you a rental and the script must be returned to the library for destruction. There is no business like show business!

We gave this play a dismal 5.75 on the ten point KV scale. A few indicated that they would not have finished the script if it had been written by anyone other than KV. We will next meet at 11:00AM on Thursday, 8/28/2014 to discuss Lawrence Broer’s “Vonnegut and Hemingway; Writers at War” which is currently available at the Vonnegut Memorial Library and on Kindle. I have worked up some notes to psych you up for this discussion. You will find them under the heading “External Essays” on this blog.