Catch-23, Skiddoo

By T.E.K.

The only thing worse than an antiwar play is war. The current mode is for such plays to be written by laughing Cassandras, doomsday seers with quips on their lips. A couple of seasons ago there was Joseph Heller's We Bombed in New Haven; now there is Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Happy Birthday, Wanda June. There is a strong temptation to say "Catch-23, please skiddoo."

To call these efforts plays is a massive overstatement. They offer nothing more than a two-hour supply of mouth froth, a dentifrice rather than a drama. Vonnegut's cute conceit has been to debunk the Ulysses myth in terms of the Hemingway legend. As Vonnegut sees it, war is a kind of priapic transplant for men whose sexual insecurity demands the bolstering arsenal of the sword, the gun, the hunt and the kill. As amateur psychologizing, that may be perfectly acceptable; as drama, it turns out to be perfectly dreadful.

The footlight lecture seems to be Vonnegut's forte, and the jawbone is his only weapon. Fortunately, it seems to be the funniest bone in his body. His sense of the absurdity of existence is quite antic and acute, though prevailingly collegiate, as epitomized in his title which features an innocent and irrelevant mite, Wanda June (Ariane Munker), who has been translated into heaven by a homicidal ice cream truck. In the role of the anti-hero hero, Kevin McCarthy is splendid. McCarthy has always been an actor with thought behind an ingratiating personality and imperishable good looks, and that is precisely what is needed here in a role that, like the play itself, consists of clownish attitudinizing.

o T.E.K.

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