Was this a happy coincidence or something else entirely, that I started this one after coming off of (re)reading "The Old Man and the Sea," by Hemingway, about a different hunt entirely? There's a great letter in the appendix entitled "On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter" (1936), the impetus for which was a discussion between Hemingway and one of his hunter friends, who, it appears, like the character General Zaroff in Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game," has become bored with the rather mundane hunting of helpless creatures (more or less), favoring instead only driven-elephant hunting, whereby he experiences the thrill of the hunt only when being charged by a seven-ton beast seeking to run him over. Hemingway says that "to him there is no sport in anything unless there is great danger and, if the danger is not enough, he will increase it for his own satisfaction."
I could proffer here my own interpretation of this person's, well, over-compensatory compulsions, but I'll leave that alone! What follows is Hemingway's fishing philosophy, specifically that there is danger aplenty in being on the sea, fishing or not, but that the thrill was in the unknowing: "in hunting you know what you are after... but who can say what you will hook sometime when drifting in a hundred and fifty fathoms in the Gulf Stream." There are different kinds of thrills, I suppose, and satisfactions, too.
Anywho: in any event, Kurt clearly didn't approve, as he demonstrates in his first play, "Wanda June." He said as much, in fact, when, he surprisingly discussed Hemingway's hunting (!), which he found distasteful, at the least. This rather irreverent play apparent began its life as "Penelope," inspired by the Odyssey, where the hero's ever-faithful wife, even after she has no reason to expect that he's still alive, having gone off to war, wards off a steady string of suitors who wish to supplant her husband. Kurt clearly doesn't see Odysseus as a hero, however, writing that he envisioned him as "a lot like that part of Hemingway which I detested - the slayer of nearly extinct animals which meant him no harm." Slayer of men, too, in Kurt's view: killing is killing, and those who enjoy the hunting of animals also usually see glory in the deaths of men. It appears that Hemingway's specter - or that of the heroic masculine ideal, at least, looms at least a little if not large in this work, as well.
As the dialogue is quite minimal, I kept asking myself, "what's this about?" I think Kurt said it best, so everyone else could understand it, is in the opening, which says, "this is a simple-minded play about men who enjoy killing, and those who don't." Essentially, it's his opposition to books by and about Hemingway-esque figures, who celebrate killing as the ultimate act of masculinity. The central character is Penelope, the wife of Harold Ryan, a big-game hunter and soldier-adventurer who claims to have killed two hundred men men, who has been lost in the Amazon jungle and presumed dead for eight years. He finally makes it back, with sidekick Colonel Harper, who it is said dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Unlike the Homeric Penelope, however, Harold's wife has been cavorting with not one but two men in his absence, a former-test-pilot-turned insurance salesman named Shuttle, and a hippie doctor, Dr. Woodly, who, as it turns out, is now Penelope's fiance, much to the chagrin of their young son, Paul, who worships the father he's never known solely on account of the epic tales of his exploits and the remnants of them: the taxidermy animals which litter their apartment.
Hilarity and farce ensues when Harold returns home, unannounced, to find that the world he left nearly a decade prior has changed much for the worse: Harold believes that the US has become castrated, weak, and all its traditional, rugged heroes have been supplanted by the type of effeminate men his wife has been entertaining. Harold laments that there is no enemy left to conquer. I don't really get where Wanda June comes in: she's a ten-year-old who was run over by an ice cream truck, and now lives in heaven with another colorful cast of characters, including Major von Konigswald, the Beast of Yugoslavia, one of Harold's victims, as well as one of Harold's former wives who drank herself to death. It seems that things are pretty tranquil in heaven, too: everyone just hangs around and plays shuffleboard. Apparently there were several versions of the play with alternate endings, but this one has a disillusioned Harold attempting suicide, ala Hemingway himself... but he can't pull it off.
The play opened in New York in 1971, and ran for about a hundred performances. It's since been reworked as an opera, which debuted at Butler University in 2016, and was revived as an Off-Off-Broadway production in 2018. Definitely not one of my favorites, but it was a curious coincidence that I read this just after finishing what is widely considered as the best of Hemingway's works and one of the most iconic works of American literature of all time. Go figure.
I could proffer here my own interpretation of this person's, well, over-compensatory compulsions, but I'll leave that alone! What follows is Hemingway's fishing philosophy, specifically that there is danger aplenty in being on the sea, fishing or not, but that the thrill was in the unknowing: "in hunting you know what you are after... but who can say what you will hook sometime when drifting in a hundred and fifty fathoms in the Gulf Stream." There are different kinds of thrills, I suppose, and satisfactions, too.
Anywho: in any event, Kurt clearly didn't approve, as he demonstrates in his first play, "Wanda June." He said as much, in fact, when, he surprisingly discussed Hemingway's hunting (!), which he found distasteful, at the least. This rather irreverent play apparent began its life as "Penelope," inspired by the Odyssey, where the hero's ever-faithful wife, even after she has no reason to expect that he's still alive, having gone off to war, wards off a steady string of suitors who wish to supplant her husband. Kurt clearly doesn't see Odysseus as a hero, however, writing that he envisioned him as "a lot like that part of Hemingway which I detested - the slayer of nearly extinct animals which meant him no harm." Slayer of men, too, in Kurt's view: killing is killing, and those who enjoy the hunting of animals also usually see glory in the deaths of men. It appears that Hemingway's specter - or that of the heroic masculine ideal, at least, looms at least a little if not large in this work, as well.
As the dialogue is quite minimal, I kept asking myself, "what's this about?" I think Kurt said it best, so everyone else could understand it, is in the opening, which says, "this is a simple-minded play about men who enjoy killing, and those who don't." Essentially, it's his opposition to books by and about Hemingway-esque figures, who celebrate killing as the ultimate act of masculinity. The central character is Penelope, the wife of Harold Ryan, a big-game hunter and soldier-adventurer who claims to have killed two hundred men men, who has been lost in the Amazon jungle and presumed dead for eight years. He finally makes it back, with sidekick Colonel Harper, who it is said dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Unlike the Homeric Penelope, however, Harold's wife has been cavorting with not one but two men in his absence, a former-test-pilot-turned insurance salesman named Shuttle, and a hippie doctor, Dr. Woodly, who, as it turns out, is now Penelope's fiance, much to the chagrin of their young son, Paul, who worships the father he's never known solely on account of the epic tales of his exploits and the remnants of them: the taxidermy animals which litter their apartment.
Hilarity and farce ensues when Harold returns home, unannounced, to find that the world he left nearly a decade prior has changed much for the worse: Harold believes that the US has become castrated, weak, and all its traditional, rugged heroes have been supplanted by the type of effeminate men his wife has been entertaining. Harold laments that there is no enemy left to conquer. I don't really get where Wanda June comes in: she's a ten-year-old who was run over by an ice cream truck, and now lives in heaven with another colorful cast of characters, including Major von Konigswald, the Beast of Yugoslavia, one of Harold's victims, as well as one of Harold's former wives who drank herself to death. It seems that things are pretty tranquil in heaven, too: everyone just hangs around and plays shuffleboard. Apparently there were several versions of the play with alternate endings, but this one has a disillusioned Harold attempting suicide, ala Hemingway himself... but he can't pull it off.
The play opened in New York in 1971, and ran for about a hundred performances. It's since been reworked as an opera, which debuted at Butler University in 2016, and was revived as an Off-Off-Broadway production in 2018. Definitely not one of my favorites, but it was a curious coincidence that I read this just after finishing what is widely considered as the best of Hemingway's works and one of the most iconic works of American literature of all time. Go figure.
