"Happy Birthday, Wanda June" is a Punch and Judy show acted out by pretended people, in case you've forgotten the real content of any Punch and Judy show. It adds up, simply, to this: Punch kills everybody, one by one, until the Devil gets him. (p. 1)

There are at least three things wrong with the play and one—much more important—that is right. The play is structurally ambivalent about death. A number of quite jolly interludes take place in a heaven that is conveniently composed of a driving rain of spotlights. There Wanda June, who has nothing to do with the play except that she has been killed by an ice-cream truck, sings girlish songs in her pretty white frock, playing shuffleboard with the Beast of Yugoslavia, a Nazi with a curled lip who deeply admires the way our hero made a mess of him during the war.

In heaven, everyone is content, happy really to be dead; even the hero's third wife has enough to drink to keep her drunk. But with death, so omnipresent, so inevitable, and so enjoyable, the main line is undercut. Does it matter so much that the victim is a killer if his victims are cheerful enough to be out of it and if we are all going to be killed anyway by ice cream trucks? The hero's killing comes to seem a bit redundant; we can't become much exercised about him, or even interested in him, if he's only expediting what's bound to come willy-nilly.

The thrust of the hero is further dulled, made to seem not terribly dangerous, by the fact that the role is [not as well written as the others]…. (pp. 1, 18)

The last thing wrong: Mr. Vonnegut has done what I thought he would never do, he has not only let himself preach, but he has also let us catch him doing it. A doctor gets out a skeletal chart of two men, asks us which of the two men can be identified as an "enemy." A wife gets too smug. "Education's my vice," she says, comparing herself to boozehounds. The doctor looks at the antiered walls and muses, "All this unending death." We don't need nudging like that—not from Vonnegut, who's burned whole cities without batting an eyelash.

But if the play has to cope with these burdens, it also brings to the theater something the theater desperately needs. An imaginative mind. An imaginative mind is not the same thing as an inventive one. An inventive mind makes things up—anything, everything. An imaginative mind doesn't. It looks around at the insane world we inhabit and reports it as it is, tells us what we knew; but it tells it in unmournful numbers that none of the rest of us would have ever used. We saw it before, we believe it now, but we'd never have said it that way. An imaginative mind makes the same contacts we do but it never recites them in our terms.

From the beginning of the evening … we hear a person, not a playwrighting computer, not a news bulletin on television, not a report to the President that the President will or won't like, but a man whose neurons and dendrites click together differently from our own. The same-plus-different is what enchants us in life, perhaps it is the only thing that ever does. And here is this man, this half-wild man, this voice, this wind-from-the-planets voice, unexpectedly and impudently and familiarly and backslappingly and despairingly speaking to us out of a one-of-a-kind head.

It's exhilarating at first, and then, when we see how much is wrong with the play, insistent. We can't turn away from it just because it makes mistakes….

Vonnegut's noises, Vonnegut's colors are Punch and Judy noises and colors, abrupt, primary, murderous, childlike, funny in the sense of funny-I-thought-I'd-die. The play falters; I find the thwack and the quack irresistible. (p. 18)