At first glance, Slaughterhouse-Five seems like a maddeningly difficult novel to translate for the stage. It’s a morality play (about how carelessly people violate the Golden Rule) embedded in a memoir (about surviving WWII and the firebombing of Dresden) embedded in a science-fiction story (about being kidnapped by aliens, stripped naked, and put on display with a porn star in an intergalactic zoo). To compound the complications, its narrator, Billy Pilgrim, is “unstuck in time,” and its author, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., wrote his novel as metafiction—a book aware of itself—and reserved the right to machete his way through all its conceits and drop by to tell us what he was thinking about when he wrote any given passage.
Adapting it sounds like a job for a war-trauma therapist with a PhD in critical theory and a working knowledge of CGI…
