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| Marsha Mason, Kevin McCarthy. |
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| Kevin McCarthy, Steven Paul. |
This first produced play by best-selling novelist and short story
writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was running Off Broadway when forced to close
because of an actors’ strike. Instead of disappearing, it transferred to a
small Broadway house for a run of several months.
Vonnegut’s difficulty with dramatic form was in evidence in
this occasionally funny work about a great white hunter (Kevin McCarthy),
modeled after both Ernest Hemingway and Ulysses, who returns after eight years
of adventuring to the lonely wife, appropriately called Penelope (Marsha Mason)
who, having thought him dead, has been sharing her affections with a physician
and a vacuum cleaner salesman. The macho husband and his sidekick (William
Hickey)—who had taken part in the bombing of Nagasaki—bring havoc in their
wake. Several ghosts wander in and out of the action, including the 10-year-old
Wanda June (Ariane Munker), who speaks from Heaven, where she journeyed after being struck by an ice cream truck while she was en route to her birthday
party.
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| Kevin McCarthy, Keith Charles. |
Most of the critics agreed that Happy Birthday, Wanda June was structurally disconnected,
thematically vague, and unnecessarily serious in intention. Yet they also
appreciated its “wild imagination and keen wit,” in James Davis’s
words; the “loving, charming and intelligent expression” of its author’s offbeat
vision,” as Martin Gottfried put it; what Clive Barnes called its “small, quiet voice of inspired
lunacy"; and its quality of being “richly and
idiosyncratically funny,”in Julius Novick's words. However, Harold Clurman
wrote that “Nothing in it is sound, either intellectually or dramatically,” and
Arthur Sainer, even more downbeat, intoned, “The play is manufactured,
unfeeling, thoroughly conventional, and smugly tuned up to make itself an
audience-pleaser.”
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| William Hickey, Keith Charles, Kevin McCarthy. |
Stars McCarthy, Mason, and Hickey were
singled out. Mason—for whom the move to the Edison provided her first Broadway
job—elicited these words from Novick: “Marsha Mason . . . is an attractive,
funny lady whose voluptuary-cute mannerisms help to keep the comedy lively, but
make it impossible to believe in her when she is supposed to emerge as an
intelligent woman with a will and a dignity of her own.”
Vonnegut’s play earned him a Drama Desk Award as Most
Promising Playwright.
