Happy Birthday, Wanda June: You’ll Shoot Your ___ Out!

Despite its Homeric inspiration, Happy Birthday, Wanda June is not a play that wallows in subtlety, as emphasized in its opening lines: “This is a simple-minded play about men who enjoy killing – and those who don’t.” In the hands of Burbage Theatre Company, it’s a well-acted, viciously funny comedy, a dark satire that shows how little has changed since the 1960s.

Central to Wanda June is Harold Ryan (Andrew Stigler), a big-game hunter and mercenary who has been missing in Africa for eight years as the play opens. His wife, Penelope Ryan (Allison Crews), had him declared dead. His 12 year-old son, Paul Ryan (Nicolas Griffin), has no memory of him but worships a romanticized image of his father. The seeming widow is being courted by two suitors, nebbishy peacenik from across the hall Dr. Norbert Woodly (Dillon Medina) and vacuum cleaner salesman Herb Shuttle (Justin Paige).

Herb, trying to placate Paul, is told that it is the birthday of the missing Harold, so he rushes out to buy the last cake at the bakery, left over and inscribed “Happy Birthday, Wanda June.” Without warning, Harold and his imbecilic sidekick Col. Looseleaf Harper (Jim Sullivan), the aviator who dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, turn up at Penelope’s apartment, still decorated with mounted big-game trophy animal heads just as he left it. Surveying the temporarily unoccupied apartment, Harold finds the cake: “What’s this? A cake? ‘Happy Birthday, Wanda June’? Who the hell is Wanda June?”

We quickly learn that Wanda June (Emeline Easton) missed her 10th birthday party because she is in heaven, which is why no one picked up her cake. Also in heaven playing shuffleboard are Major Siegfried von Königswald, the Beast of Yugoslavia (Geoff Leatham), a Nazi officer strangled to death by Harold with bare hands, and Mildred Ryan (Rae Mancini), one of Harold’s ex-wives whom, like all of his ex-wives, he drove to drink.

Kurt Vonnegut, arguably the greatest satirist in American literature since Mark Twain, was not really a playwright. Various sources attribute five or more plays to him, but some of these were strictly for television and others remain unproduced entirely. With his 1969 publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, the runaway bestselling novel overtly about World War II that captured the zeitgeist against the then-escalating Vietnam War, after nearly two decades laboring to produce six novels and numerous short stories, Vonnegut finally escaped the critically ignored and badly paid science-fiction genre into which he had been involuntarily pigeon-holed. In speaking truth to power, if Kurt Vonnegut had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him.

At a 92nd Street Y reading from his seventh novel, Breakfast of Champions, then a work in progress years before it would be published in 1973, he was approached by movie producer Lester Goldsmith who asked if he had written a play and offered to option it, sight unseen. Vonnegut thought that was ridiculous, but he resurrected what he decided was his best play, a comic parody of Homer’s Odyssey called Penelope that he had written in 1960, dusted it off, extensively rewrote it, and turned it into Happy Birthday, Wanda June. Running from December 1970 to March 1971, it was shut down by an actors’ strike and would prove the only foray onto Broadway for both Vonnegut and Goldsmith. A film version was Goldsmith’s real goal, released in late 1971, but so badly miscast and mishandled by experienced-but-clueless director Mark Robson that Vonnegut reportedly tried to take his name off the film that would be deservedly ridiculed by critics. In Palm Sunday, the always self-critical Vonnegut infamously assigned grades to his own works to that point (1981), with Slaughterhouse getting an A+ and Wanda June getting a D.

Yet, Wanda June has the potential to be a great stage production, and Burbage wisely avoids the mistake that dooms most productions, including the 1971 film: The characters are intended to be cartoon characters, and the more they act like cartoon characters the funnier the play is. We don’t want ironic self-awareness in these characters, any more than we want ironic self-awareness from the Road Runner and the Coyote. We know that the train tunnel is just painted on a rock, but we wait for the Coyote to smash into it every time. We know that Acme doesn’t make very reliable products, especially explosives, but very low on my list of documentaries I ever want to see is Acme and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Properly done, and Burbage does a great job, Happy Birthday, Wanda June is as outrageously funny as a Road Runner and Coyote cartoon, except with even more black humor, social awareness and adult sophistication.

Harold, to say the least, is not a nice man. In a flashback scene of the original meeting between Harold and Penelope, then an innocent car-hop waitress, he tells her, “I’ve just come back from Kenya – in Africa. I’ve been hunting Mau Mau there.” She naively asks, “Some kind of animal?” He explains, “The pelt is black. It’s a kind of man.” Vonnegut, who personally covered the 1967-1970 Nigerian Civil War as a journalist in Biafra, expected his audiences to understand that Harold was bragging about being a mercenary in the 1952-1960 anti-colonial Mau Mau Uprising, a touchstone of atrocity noted for the brutality of response by British Imperial forces who killed at least 50,000 people, more than half of them non-combatant civilians, including over 1,000 by quasi-judicial hanging.

With the killing fields of the Middle East today on par with those of Africa during decolonialization, and hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced in the Syrian civil war, Burbage Theatre Company makes an implicit case for the continuing relevance of what could be mistaken as a relic of the 1960s. They “get” the play, even supplying walk-in music as the audience is taking seats that included Pete Seeger‘s “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” an anti-war song that reportedly got the Smothers Brothers kicked off network television, but Wanda June is about a lot more than the world of Dwight Eisenhower colliding with the world of Lyndon Johnson. Almost 50 years old when Slaughterhouse made him a big-name celebrity, Vonnegut was no hippie, as he made evident in articles critical of the “tune in, turn on, drop out” movement with titles such as “Why They Read Hesse” and “Yes, We Have No Nirvanas.”

Andrew Stigler as Harold Ryan is the key to making the play work, and he does it: Harold has to be played with earnest seriousness as a Hemingway-esque hero in order to be a buffoon worthy of satire, able to deliver without hint of irony such lines as, “Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch. Everything stops.” Stigler pulls off a brilliant characterization, straddling the arrogance of Homer’s Odysseus and the boorishness of Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden. Dillon Medina as Woodly wears a shirt and tie and avoids the excesses often associated with the character, such as long hair and hippie beads, turning him into a mirror image whose earnestness gives him more in common with Harold than he wants to admit. Especially outstanding is Rae Mancini as the sloppy drunk Mildred Ryan, stealing every brief scene in which she appears. Nicolas Griffin as the 12-year-old Paul Ryan strikes the right balance between childish hero-worship and teenage disillusionment. Jim Sullivan as Col. Looseleaf Harper meets the challenge of a difficult role, a man who is the exact opposite of a deep thinker and whose mantra seems to alternate between either “Jesus, I dunno” or “It was a bitch.” Emeline Easton as Wanda June pulls off a performance without a hint of irony and credibly evokes the naive optimism of a 10-year-old dead girl. Geoff Leatham manages about as much comic relief as one can get wearing a Nazi uniform complete with brown shirt and swastika armband. Allison Crews as Penelope Ryan and Justin Paige as Herb Shuttle are not given a lot to do by the script, but what they do is done well.

Happy Birthday, Wanda June is one of my favorite scripts, and I’ve always hoped to see it done as entertainingly as Burbage does it here. As of this writing, Burbage has sold out every one of their first four performances at Aurora, not a small venue with about 100 seats, but there are six remaining performances. I am frankly stunned to see such an enthusiastic turnout for what I regard as a fairly obscure and rarely performed play, although people on either side of me were laughing uncontrollably. Maybe whenever the world starts to enjoy killing, Vonnegut finds an audience – oh, wait a minute, that’s all the time.

Happy Birthday, Wanda June, directed by Wendy Overly, Burbage Theatre Company at Aurora, 276 Westminster St, PVD. Thu (1/28, 2/4), Fri (1/22, 1/29, 2/5) 7pm, Sat (1/30) 6pm. Approximately 2 hours including 10-minute intermission. Web: http://www.burbagetheatre.org/#!blank/dxuu3 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BurbageTheatreCompany/ Tickets sales are strictly cash at the door, no cards. Reservations, but not advance sales, are available by e-mail: mailto:boxoffice@burbagetheatre.org?subject=Ticket%20Reservations On-street parking at meters is free after 6pm, with spaces often available on Westminster St, Greene St, and Dorrance St. Aurora is open daily from 5pm to city closing time (1am or 2am) and offers a full-service bar accepting both cash and cards. Web: http://www.auroraprovidence.com/