(59E59; 60 SEATS; $25 TOP) NEW YORK A Godlight Theater Company presentation of a play in one act by Eric Simonson, based on the novel by Kurt Vonnegut. Directed by Joe Tantalo. Sets, costumes, lighting, Maruti Evans; original music and sound, Andrew...

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A hometown celebration of Kurt Vonnegut's life and literary prowess was highlighted Friday night with the last thing the author wrote _ a speech he had planned to deliver himself at Butler University.Vonnegut wrote the 13-page lecture two weeks before he died at age 84...

Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking...

The recent George Roy Hill-Paul Monash production of Slaughterhouse-Five impressed me as one of the most advanced and systematic achievements in deployment of Space-Time and recalled especially the theme and style of [Alain] Resnais's last film, Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968). Although Hill confirmed to me that he has never seen the Resnais film … the formal treatment of the story is structurally and thematically close to the earlier Resnais work. (p. 3) Anyone familiar with the nua...

Occasionally the film version of a novel is successful enough to make a comparison between the two helpful in understanding the strengths of both…. [Such is the case for] George Roy Hill's adaption of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five. While [screenwriter Stephen] Geller has imposed a sense of order to improve the visual adaptation, director George Roy Hill … has wisely chosen to eschew any sense of sensationalism in what could have been misconstrued by some as nothing mor...

Peace, free will, and art are … the essence of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five; but George Roy Hill's movie of the same name is redolent of different juices entirely. Hill's burden was heavy: he not only had to reconceive the story according to his own filmic lights, he had to reverence the details of the fiction as so many cult objects for his projected audience. And his artifices do not suffice to carry the load. His failure is similar to that of Mike Nichols with Catch 22. [Jos...