Slaughterhouse Five: the Play

This is a brave attempt to do the near impossible – and it succeeds in what audiences appreciate most – humor.   

      But Vonnegut’s humor is of the darkest variety, and getting across that darkness and still getting people to laugh at it is not so easy, especially in a play, where for the most part your only tools are words.  Slaughterhouse Five, the novel, has always seemed to me like a 200-page thesis on two lines of poetry from Byron:  “If I laugh at any mortal thing, ‘Tis that I may not weep.”  Billy Pilgrim, the central character, weeps often, and alone.  It’s one of two things he does alone; the other is time-travel.

      Let’s not forget that the venue for this play is a theatre at 21 Clinton Street in Lower Manhattan with the name “Celebration of Whimsy.”   This play focuses on the whimsy of time travel.  The humor spills out of the sudden shifts of venue, sometimes kept secret from the other characters in the play, which elicits laughter.    This is the story of Slaughterhouse Five told from the viewpoint of the Trafalmadorians , inhabitants of Billy Pilgrim’s other-worldly destination, who believe that everything is how it is and how it will always be.  The Trafalmadorian character in the play is a disembodied, voice beautifully rendered by Lena Hudson.  The audience broke into laughter often.

     Before seeing this play, I re-read Slaughterhouse Five and watched the movie once again.  What struck me is its thorough relevance to today, as if in handing us the book Vonnegut conveys one of Billy Pilgrim’s “memories of the future.”   The Trafalmadorians explain that war has always been with us and always will be… but that’s at a distance from earth, as Vonnegut tells us, of 446,120,000,000,000,000 miles.  Up close, it doesn’t seem so natural.  This number of miles may approximate the distance between those who experience it first-hand and those who never do. 

      In an interview on the director’s cut of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman waxes on about some of the differences between a play and movie.  In a movie you can just shift the scene; you can burn down a building to change the action as he does in that film.  David Mamet in On Directing Film tells us that the best films tell a story through a series of images, like those in a dream, like Billy Pilgrim’s flash-backs (today we call it PSTD).  Slaughterhouse Five, the movie, shows us a bombed-out Dresden, reduced to flames and rubble.   It shows us piles of dead bodies deliberately torched by soldiers with flamethrowers because there are too many to bury, and it is the only practical thing to do.  The book gives us these vivid images, too.  Not so easy in a play.  So we get lots of humor without all the horror.  So it goes. 

     Jamie Efros is a suitably bewildered Billy Pilgrim, confident only when reporting on the Trafalmadorian fourth dimension.  Anni Weisband embodies Montana Wildhack’s sexy attitude.  Christopher Travlos is convincing even though too young for both of his roles – the unfortunate Edgar Derby and the wise Eliot Rosewater.  Since Rachel Berger looks much better than the physical description of her Vonnegut gives, she has to persuade us through annoying behavior that her choice as Billy’s wife was an unlikely one, which she accomplishes.  Daria Tavana is the playwright; Jenny Beth Snyder is the director.  

     For complete production info: http://www.truefalsetheatre.org/blog/