3.5
Happy Birthday, Wanda June
ByPublisher Description
“Richly and often pertinently funny [with] a sure instinct for the carefully considered irrelevance . . . a great deal of incidental hilarity [and] inspired idiocy.”—The New York Times
Happy Birthday Wanda June was Kurt Vonnegut’s first play, which premiered in New York in 1970 and was then adapted into a film in 1971. It is a darkly humorous and searing examination of the excesses of capitalism, patriotism, toxic masculinity, and American culture in the post-Vietnam War era. Featuring behind-the-scenes photographs from the original stage production, this play captures Vonnegut’s brilliantly distinct perspective unlike we have ever seen it before.
“A great artist.”—The Cincinnati Enquirer
Happy Birthday Wanda June was Kurt Vonnegut’s first play, which premiered in New York in 1970 and was then adapted into a film in 1971. It is a darkly humorous and searing examination of the excesses of capitalism, patriotism, toxic masculinity, and American culture in the post-Vietnam War era. Featuring behind-the-scenes photographs from the original stage production, this play captures Vonnegut’s brilliantly distinct perspective unlike we have ever seen it before.
“A great artist.”—The Cincinnati Enquirer
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesHappy Birthday, Wanda June Reviews
3.5
JUP1828 🐶📕📙📔📗📘♊️
Created about 2 months agoShare
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“2.5⭐️ for the one liners and themes. The creative use of deceased people was helpful. This is a play a day honestly, not his best work, but still fun to read. I just didnt connect much with the story over all.”
Lyss
Created 3 months agoShare
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“Vonnegut’s play gives a compelling modern-day parallel to Odysseus’s homecoming, when Harold -hunter of man and beasts- returns to his newly educated and engaged wife, Penelope, and young son, Paul, after eight years of adventuring. He finds that Penelope is now in love with the antithesis of his an existence, a pacifistic doctor named Woodley. Harold, in an attempt to both lull and frighten his family back into his embrace, regales them with stories of his machismo adventures with his sidekick Looseleaf: the man responsible for dropping the atom bomb on Nagasaki. When all else fails, he enters a fit of rage which inevitably leads to Penelope leaving him.
This play speaks about how our standards for heroism changes over time, whether that be in the thousands of years since Homer’s Odyssey was put to paper or in the eight years it took Harold to return home. The story reaches its crescendo when Woodley builds up the confidence to confront Harold once and for all, calling him obsolete, a hollow shell of what a hero once was. Humans have always gravitated towards violent acts of “heroism” during times of war, but then the pendulum swings, and self corrects. This is why modern audiences tend to relate more to the martyrdom of Hector than the brutal, sheer power of Achilles when reading the Iliad. Harold doesn’t belong in this post-war era. He serves no purpose.
Of course, the joke of it all is that Harold’s killing is for not. Everyone he has ever killed ends up in the same place: Heaven. All this slaughter just to meet again in a paradise where they cannot be so easily disposed of. Vonnegut’s Heaven is populated by Albert Einstein, ten year-old Wanda June, and Hitler.”
earthy.bugg
Created 6 months agoShare
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“brilliant, no notes.”
Rez
Created 6 months agoShare
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“Vonnegut has a humor and perspective about him I always like coming back and revisiting every so often. His writing has a way of reading as timeless and themes always seem relevant and poignant cloaked beneath layers of dark humor and quirky characters.
This is a quick read in play format - overall can be knocked out in about an hour. I recommend it if you need a thought-provoking Vonnegut fix that’s not too heavy.”
Emily
Created 6 months agoShare
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“after sleeping on it, i’m bumping it up. i gave it a lower rating initially bc of some of the disgust I felt, but since that’s intentionally done, i think it actually elevates it.
KV really said fuck ernest hemingway and odysseus lol”
About Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut’s humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America’s attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him as “a true artist” (The New York Times) with Cat’s Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, “one of the best living American writers.” Mr. Vonnegut passed away in April 2007.
Other books by Kurt Vonnegut
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