The Spirit of Kurt Vonnegut, Still Alive in 'Wanda June'

It feels good to spend time in Kurt Vonnegut country with "Happy Birthday, Wanda June," which is being revived in a modest but infectious act of devotion by the American Century Theater. Up the establishment! Give peace a chance!

Vonnegut, one of the patron saints of hippie fiction, wrote "Wanda June" as an agreeably shaggy and heartbroken follow-up to his best-known work, "Slaughterhouse-Five." The "Slaughterhouse" shadows are all over the 1970 "Wanda June" script: fantasy, antic wit, fierce antiwar attitudes, and characters bordering on the cartoonish but enlarged by the rich spirit who animated them.

It boils down pretty simply, as Vonnegut acknowledged at the top: Are you for death and violence, or against it? The tension is written into the design of the city apartment where most of the action occurs. (The rest happens in Heaven, as the dead offer quirky testimonials on one thing and another.)

Trena Weiss-Null's design highlights the trophy heads on the walls and animal prints on the furniture. Someone here plainly likes to kill.

That would be Harold Ryan, a frank stand-in for the brusque violence and sexism of Ernest Hemingway, at least as Vonnegut saw it. As Ryan, the bearded William Aitken all but snorts and scratches the earth.

"I could carve a better man out of a banana," Ryan scoffs of one of his rivals, a line that Aitken imbues with typical vainglorious disgust.

Ryan, a renowned killer and revered "man's man," has been missing for eight years when the play begins, and is feared to be dead. Two suitors, a peacenik doctor and a vacuum salesman, are circling his wife, Penelope (shades of "The Odyssey"), and his adolescent son, Paul. So Ryan's unexpected return sets up a contest to be waged with, what -- brute force? Or love?

No question where Vonnegut stands, which makes the second act feel slack as the author knocks down his straw man. The play is in better shape when it lampoons the Hemingway swagger, takes anarchic side trips to Heaven to meet the young, dead Wanda June and others, or recalls how Ryan first swept Penelope off her feet with the ease of a conqueror.

Ellen Dempsey's shoestring production in the Gunston Arts Center's small black-box theater is earnest and serviceable, with Aitken and Kari Ginsburg (as an appealing, increasingly articulate Penelope) delivering the most assured performances. Joe Cronin uses a daffy half-smile as Looseleaf Harper, Ryan's sidekick and the man who dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, and Bill Gordon almost gets enough kookiness into his turn as a deceased Nazi (such accomplished killers everywhere) describing a few things in Heaven and on Earth.

Dempsey unfortunately lets the energy evaporate between scenes, but Rip Claassen has fun with the period costumes -- the animal-print fabrics and leather go-go boots for Penelope are right on target -- and AnnMarie Castrigno puts a tropical quality in the lights. It's not sterling work, and neither is the play, yet the company is right to revive "Wanda June."

Vonnegut dances his mischievous jig, now and then even showing -- as in the quietly arresting end of the first act -- the flashes of plain wisdom that made his writing so dear to so many.

Happy Birthday, Wanda June, by Kurt Vonnegut. Directed by Ellen Dempsey. Sound design, Jake Null. With Andrew Newman, Adin Walker, Brian Crane, Brian Razzino, Rachel Weber and Deborah Rinn Critzer. About 2 hours 15 minutes. Through March 29 at the Gunston Arts Center, 2700 S. Lang St., Arlington. Call 703-998-4555 or visit http://www.americancentury.org.