Men can’t be men anymore. Talk about oppression. It breaks my heart to see a man ashamed to reveal his six-pack (of beer or otherwise), stuttering over the words “leg day” as his lips tremble in fear. Why are we so cruel to shun a man for wanting to eat a fat, juicy steak, or spit on the ground, or kick, or punch, or yell? In a heartfelt speech directed at his fellow men, Vice President J.D. Vance addresses the pressing issue with stunning effectiveness. In her New York Times article “Bench Presses, Pull Ups … Kid Rock? The White House Had a Very Manly Week,” Katie Rogers quotes him as saying, “Don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends or because you’re competitive.”
You’re right, Mr. Vance. Thank you for the wise words. It is a kind of oppression that concerns us all. Its magnitude cannot compare to the smaller threat represented by the world’s big powers holding a uranium-stuffed pillow over our planet’s head, threatening to suffocate existence with an arm’s movement. Men need to be men again. And masculinity, historically, has meant power. And power, historically, has meant violence.
But nobody wants to say that. There’s nothing violent about a Sunday cookout or a football game, right? Manly men are the heroes of society. Think of Odysseus, who came back from his years-long journey to slay his wife’s suitors and re-claim his rightful place in Ithaca. Myths and other stories have taught us that those are the figures to be praised. Kurt Vonnegut knew this. He wrote a play about it: Happy Birthday, Wanda June, starring another manly hero by the name of Harold Ryan. The best part? He’s American! And a Vietnam war veteran! I just swoon.
From February 19-21, Happy Birthday, Wanda June performed at Yale, in Trumbull College’s Nick Chapel Theatre. Produced by Tali Kantor Lieber, PC ’28, and directed by Sofia Audi, DC ’28, the play adapts the Odyssey and sets it in 1960s America, when war was status quo and peace was rebellion. Harold (Gil Altman, BR ’28), a Vietnam war hero of extreme traditional values, returns home after being presumed dead for eight years to find his wife Penelope (Reeti Malhotra SM ’28) entangled with two suitors, one of whom she is engaged to. The latter, Dr. Norbert Woodley, (Nick Ostroski BF ’28), is the antithesis to the violent man. A violin-playing John Lennon knock-off, Woodley enters Penelope’s grotesque home, visibly out of place. The apartment remembers Harold’s presence with animal carcasses elegantly nailed to the walls and the unshakable impression that the smell of cigar smoke could not come out of the sofa cushions if you washed them with acid. Woodley, a doctor, a healer, an ambulant peace-sign, is exactly what Harold is not, and what men today are becoming as they fear embracing their true, manly selves: a pussy.
That seems to be precisely the reason Penelope loves him and chooses him over her alternative suitor, Herb Shuttle (Sasha Foer, MC ’28). Herb Shuttle is the 1960s equivalent of a 4chan warrior, the sort of guy who’d rub Cheeto dust on his shirt and spit hateful misogynistic commentary at his computer screen while he watches an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. He sells vacuum cleaners, deadly tools that entrap women in their domestic cages. We get the impression that his pursuit of Penelope is motivated by an intense, not-too-subtly homoerotic adoration of Harold Ryan and his very manly war-related pursuits.
Rogers, the Times writer, tells tales of a similar homoerotic dynamic she identifies inside the White House itself in her NYT piece: there is something deeply sensual about the desire of powerful men to share their powerfulness with each other in a beautiful, intimate moment of grunting and sweating—that is, Rogers tells, at the gym. This deep desire oozes out of the cracks in our screens as we watch Kid Rock and RFK Jr. work out together in the White House’s new fitness center. As Rogers notes, “Mr. Trump’s latest masculinity proclamations sum up this administration’s hard-line approach to maleness, where the most powerful men in the country can just relax and be men who appreciate other men—in a strictly manly way, of course.”
When masculinity is incarnated in a set of qualities to strive for, including influence, strength, and endurance, proving oneself to retain such qualities is a deeply satisfactory, orgasmic experience. To share that, man to man, is as intimate of a connection as sex. Power and sex, both animated by an inexplicable desire to obtain them, can never be separated. Herb, a power fanatic and war enthusiast, displays his adoration for the Vietnam War hero by longingly worshipping Harold’s every move.
Dr. Woodley is not wrapped up in these ping-ponged displays of masculinity—or so he thinks. Towards the end of the play, when Harold destroys Woodley’s violin to avenge his wife’s relationship with the doctor and defend his lost honor, Woodley returns to Harold and Penelope’s home to confront him and fight to defend his own honor as Penelope’s fiance.
In Wanda June, honor becomes the driving force that makes all men in Western society equal in their mechanism. An inherently gendered word, honor is a concept unfamiliar to women, the justification of imposing oneself, sometimes through violent actions or the threat thereof, with the intention of protecting the bloated masculine sense of self. Think of how Hamilton died, or of the entire premise of Bridgerton: historically, male reputation has taken the place of that of entire groups they represent, often resulting in women’s erroneous behavior being mended by men’s brave, violent actions. Woodley, then, is no better than Harold—he appears as a lesser evil, of course, because the potential for violence is less dangerous than violence itself, and he, as opposed to Harold, is never violent over the course of the play. However, Woodley’s character exists to underline the patterns of male behavior that perpetuate notions of masculinity in dangerous ways, not abandoning the male ego, but rather feeding it by either appealing entirely to the image of the “manly” man or by countering it. In countering it, as Woodley does, the man feels good about himself, like he is better than the macho man, reproducing what Mr.Vance calls friendly, “brotherly” competition. The peaceful man (in today’s jargon the performative man, or “matcha man”) is born to compete with the macho man, making his rejection of traditional masculinity, ironically, a toxic, masculine ego-driven decision.
The matcha man is an entity that abandons traditional masculine power by embodying softer traits that have historically been associated with femininity, essentially stating that femininity is powerlessness. The difference is that, under the current social conditions, men have the choice to cosplay powerlessness, while women seem stuck in their “powerless” state. It is hard then, despite his pure intentions, to think of Woodley as Wanda June’s hero. Perhaps heroism is not always revealed in the grand gestures.
Although a good chunk of Happy Birthday, Wanda June’s stage time is occupied by the loud quarrels between men who are busy playing who-has-it-bigger, one of the most striking moments of the play comes when Penelope chooses to leave. As a woman, it feels unfair to constantly be chopped out of the conversation, never considered, moving in the shadows of one’s own home. But Penelope chooses to see that exclusion as a privilege: she does not need to be considered to hold power—she would never acquire it by searching for it in men. She seeks her own power out by escaping the animal cage she was trapped in all that time. Men can never escape their honor-driven competition with each other, the miserable bickering they’ve decided to call “power” to make themselves feel better. Women cannot quarrel with them, and isn’t that a relief?
Happy Birthday, Wanda June is an adaptation with a capital A. During a conversation with the Herald, Audi notes that it was crucial for the story to feel dated for the audience to digest certain truths in our contemporary world. Wanda June helps us transpose a past reality to today’s gendered politics, making us keener to notice the strangeness of the President’s use of misogynist buzz words during his press conferences, or to squint our eyes at a picture of RFK Jr. and Kid Rock lifting together while I’m sure, in their minds, they’d rather be passionately making out on the bench press. The play caricatures reality in a way that makes its flaws obvious, but distances it from the audience’s lived experience enough to eliminate bias as much as possible. It turns a tale of male greatness into a parody of itself, recognizing the flaws woven into the art which society has uplifted as the greatest representation of humankind, and responding to this flaw fearlessly.
