BrightestYoungThings: Play DC: Happy Bday Wanda June

If death is as Kurt Vonnegut theatrically imagined it, he’s in heaven happily playing shuffleboard with Jesus in a blue and gold warm-up jacket as the American Century Theater resuscitates his 1970 play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June.

Wanda June is a young girl who was killed on her birthday by a drunk ice cream truck driver. But don’t feel sorry for her. The budding 15-year-old actress, Rachel Weber, assures the audience that it hurt less than the sting of a bumblebee and that “everybody up here [heaven] is happy—the animals and the dead soldiers and people who went to the electric chair and everything. They're all glad for whatever sent them here. Nobody is mad. We're all too busy playing shuffleboard.”

The real victims are the protagonists who eat the undelivered birthday cake left behind at the bakery. Big game hunter, soldier, and classic Hemmingway hero, Harold Ryan, returns home from the Amazon with his pilot, Looseleaf Harper—the man who dropped the bomb on Nagasaki—after missing (and being declared dead) for eight years. Harold finds his wife, Penelope, being courted by a hippie doctor who insists on always exiting with a fragile, two-fingered peace sign and a vacuum salesman with an inflated ego who still lives with his foot-less mother. The clash of these foiled characters is the figurative meat of Vonnegut’s dramatic criticism of the Vietnam War.

Vonnegut was the first to admit that he refused to obey the requirements of a “well-made play.” Director Ellen Dempsey and the cast bear the difficult responsibility of navigating an audience through Vonnegut’s uncharted theatrical territory. The acting is unsteadily steered alongside Vonnegut’s contradicting and playfully dark humor. The witty dialogue comes off as neither natural nor spectacular, as the cast struggles to balance over-acting with under-exaggerating. The results are often amusing, sometimes heartrending; but mostly bumpy and awkward.

The best performances are heaven-sent—in the sense that they come not only in the form of Weber playing Wanda June, but also Bill Gordon as dead Nazi soldier, Siegfried von Koningswald—the beast of Yugoslavia—who killed a man with orange juice. Gordon hilariously dilates a fake German accent when explaining, “It was almost worth the trip—to find out that Jesus Christ in Heaven was just another guy, playing shuffleboard.” Deborah Rinn Crtizer is electrifying as Harold’s dead third wife, Mildred, who demanded confirmation from an elderly audience member when justifying her resort to alcoholism by declaring, “Now, no grown woman is a fan of premature ejaculation.”

Vonnegut’s snappy witticism and snarky social commentary is half-buried, but well preserved. In the tradition of Vonnegut, what is introduced as “a simple-minded play about men who enjoy killing—and those who don't,” turns out to be that and so much more.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE
Starring Bill Aitken, Kari Ginsberg, Joe Cronin, Brian Crane, and Brian Razzino. Written by Kurt Vonnegut, directed by Ellen Dempsey. Presented by the American Century Theater, Gunston Arts Center, Theater 2, Arlington, VA. Through March 29.

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