Dalton Trumbo’s: Johnny Goes to War

A play by Dalton Trumbo with a soundtrack by Mark Reeder

Translated into German by Johanna Wais | Adapted by Bradley R. Smith

Joe Bonham, a young US soldier, is nearly killed by a shell in Europe during the First World War. Nearly, because Joe loses his arms and legs, his face, his eyes, his ears, his nose and his mouth.
He can neither see nor hear, nor even speak; only his torso and brain have survived the explosion and the medical operations. Joe can think; waking up in a hospital bed, he takes stock of his situation; he feels the fabric against his skin, the draught in the room and the touch of others; he can remember the war, his childhood, his parents, his first love, but he cannot make himself understood.

Trapped inside his own body, he realises that the doctors are exploiting him as a sensation, indeed as a subject for study. Yet Joe finds a way to communicate. He demands his right to a dignified death.

On 3 September 1939, just two days after the outbreak of the Second World War, Dalton Trumbo’s novel *Johnny Got His Gun* was published. The title is an allusion to the ‘Johnny, get your gun’ campaign , which had been used for decades to recruit young men for service in the US Army. The book made the author famous. It is an extraordinary, a terrible book: brutal and yet full of poetry, infinitely cruel, but full of love. No one has ever depicted war as ruthlessly as Trumbo, nor spoken so movingly of the beauty and values of life. Just a few years later, thousands of Americans would refuse to bear arms, citing *Johnny Got His Gun *.

Haus Zittau Studio Theatre

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