Happy Birthday, Wanda June!

Earlier this week myself and a group of my friends sat down together with glasses of wine and read a play aloud. We decided who would get which parts by drawing character names from a hat. We decided (actually it was just my decision, I never though to ask anyone else) that we would read "Happy Birthday, Wanda June!", a play written by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I will write about what I thought of the play in a moment, but I did want to say that I think this is the nerdiest thing I have done in many many years (if not the nerdiest think I have done in my entire life). But despite the embarrassment that we could have had, we all did it without being ashamed. I believe it was just planned so fast that we didn't have time to think about what our highschool aged selves would have thought about our actions, and that was a good thing.

"Happy Birthday, Wanda June!" was a play that was supposed to be a modern retelling of the return of Odysseus from his long journey to find his son miserable and his wife being courted by numerous men. But it would misleading if I did not say that the play was nothing like the story told in the Odyssey (as pointed out numerous times by Shaun King). That didn't bother me too much because I wasn't expecting it to be anything predictable. I don't think I have ever ready anything by Kurt Vonnegut that was expected. I think one of the few similarities between the ancient story and the modern play was that each character was a in the same situation as their counterpart. Odysseus and Harold were both returning from a long adventure that was supposed to have taken their lives. Penelope and modern Penelope are both being pursued by suitors and about to decide which will be her new husband. Telemachus and Paul are both unhappy with the suitors and the replacement of their father figure. Even the personalities of the characters are similar, but Vonnegut definitely gives them more consistent character flaws and realistic responses to circumstance (Harold is violent like Odysseus, but his violent nature isn't celebrated or exaggerated as heroism; Penelope has emotional issues with the return of Harold). Despite those few similarities, the two stories are barely recognizable as related.

Throughout the story Vonnegut explores how different philosophies interact with another. There are many different places to find the characters arguing about feminism vs. traditional chauvinism and subtle things of that nature, but the biggest philosophical argument in the story is pacifism vs. violence. One of the suitors is a doctor and pacifist while Harold is a violent man who takes what he wants and has killed or will kill to survive. I probably wouldn't have noticed this if it weren't for the intro from Vonnegut, but in the end the moral was that both men have correct philosophies. Vonnegut had written in his introduction that he wanted to write a play where every character thought they were right all the time and actually were right all the time even though they conflicted with one another. Harold is correct that the way he lives his life gives him great happiness and power, but Woodly (the Pacifist) is also correct that his way of life is better for humanity. Their final argument is the climax of the play and the way it ends is that both men are a joke in themselves. Harold is a joke because he hates himself for not dying because he views death as the greatest honor for a man of violence, and Woodly is a joke because his pacifism is a reflection of his cowardice. I am not sure if I know for sure that this was a theme of the play, but it is not uncomm0n for Kurt Vonnegut's message to be that we are all living within the context of a big cruel joke. We are all inconsistent and compromise our values without remorse. We all know that who we are and what we stand for is just a reflection of our fears and weaknesses. What we value is what we think will keep us alive longest, not what truly has value. I do not necessarily agree with Vonnegut's moral, that we are all living a lie, but I do think the picture he paints of humanity is a valid portrait of our nature. We can all be violent pacifists, and chauvenist feminists, and Christian Nihilists, and..........