HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE
By Kurt Vonnegut
Directed by Sam Varteniuk
Jan 28-31, Feb 3-7
Walterdale Playhouse

What happens when a classical hero returns from a journey to find himself in the middle of the sexual revolution? The answer is something that requires a really skewed imagination to puzzle out.

It’s fitting, then, that for his only play, Vonnegut chose to create what director Sam Varteniuk describes as "what happens when you throw Earnest Hemingway in a bottle with Homer’s The Odyssey and shake it really hard."

Walterdale Playhouse’s production of Happy Birthday, Wanda June follows the repercussions of the return of Harold, who disappeared on a safari in 1962 and didn’t bother to tell anyone he was alive for eight years. The overbearingly manly hero returns to 1970 to find his docile young wife has become a self-sufficient woman and the America of his birth transformed by the turbulent ’60s into an unrecognizable place.

"In the Odyssey, Odysseus came home and killed all his wife’s suitors," says Varteniuk. "By ancient Greek standards that was alright, but Harold learns the hard way, or maybe Penelope learns the hard way, that you can’t take a man from the age of golden heroes and put him into modern society and expect it to be a harmonious marriage."

Like most of Vonnegut’s work, the play reaches far deeper than its bizarre situations initially reveal. "It’s a play that explores the myth of manliness, what it means to be a self-possessed woman and what happens when those two things collide," says Varteniuk. "But that’s what Vonnegut’s all about: people in extreme situations coming to terms with some facet of their morality that they’ve never had to deal with before."

As an undergrad, the director devoured as many of the writer’s novels as he could. "He’s a real binge sort of writer," explains Varteniuk

But how does a novelist known for his oddball take on the more fantastic elements of science fiction translate his style to the stage? "It’s the difference between showing and telling," Varteniuk says. "In a novel you have paragraphs of interior monologue where you can explain how a particular person’s mind changes. On stage you have to show it."

"When I first read the play, I was aware of [the necessity to] activate the language," he continues. "Vonnegut was a novelist and he worked very hard to activate that language and as a director I wanted to see what I could do to help with that." He did so by choosing, for the first time in the history of Walterdale Playhouse’s current incarnation, to produce a play in the round.

"It lights a fire under the play’s bum," he says. "People have to keep moving. It forces the play into a very active state."

And if you’re a fan of the author, Varteniuk wants you to know: "There’s a lot of little treats in there."