Word: vonnegut
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...novices: "Start with a first edition of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow at $150, and invest intelligently at the remainder table. After all, many of the novels published in the '60s became important emotional furniture to a generation now competitively collecting books. Authors like Kurt Vonnegut, Walker Percy and Joyce Carol Gates now command rare-volume respect...
...public schools or libraries-but not for praise. In fact, these distinguished titles all appear on some current list or other of banned books: Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Ralph Ellison's Invisible. Man, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, P.L Travers' Mary Poppins and The American Heritage Dictionary. Last week a collection of literary luminaries from...
...Nagasaki. Harper represents the daffy nonchalance of a mass murderer. Yet again, the plenitude of Big Themes hurts Wanda June, diverting from solid acting performances Sands, for example, portrays a truly crazy man and provides a refreshing moment of amusement with his string of "I don't know" responses. Vonnegut attempts to satirize the mass murderers of past wars by depicting them as ridiculous klutzes...
...VONNEGUT GETS his cynicism about heaven into the act as well. In the most bizarre part of the play, he introduces Wanda June, a 10-year-old girl who has recently arrived in heaven and who describes heaven as a pseudo-country club which everyone's welcome to join. Even Jesus Christ plays shuffleboard there. Wanda June is only tangentially related to the plot: the birthday cake meant for her ends up in the Ryans living room. Susan Morris plays Wanda June with a lot of vitality and youthfulness, but we don't see enough of her; she spends...
...Vonnegut's play is unfinished and unpolished, no, for the most part, is Kirkland's production of it. And with a lousy script and poor tuning it's easy to understand why the actors often seem uninspiring. Had Vonnegut polished his modern-day Odyssey better, perhaps Kirkland could have utilized the talents simmering in most of the cast. But for the time being. You'd do better to stick with Homer...