"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...