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Joseph Heller's Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 The Aquila Theatre Company Welcome! The State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey welcomes you to the school-day performance of Aquila Theatre Company in Catch-22. The show is based on Heller’s own stage adaptation of his groundbreaking novel. With the full support of Joseph Heller’s estate and family, Aquila Theatre has created the first-ever professional production to tour nationally. This show is scheduled to be the first major production of the play to be seen in London and New York. The B-25 crew These Keynotes provide information and activities that will help you follow and enjoy the show. We hope it will also help you find connections between what you see on the stage and your own personal experience. CONTENTS Welcome/Acknowledgements........................................................................2 “Catch-22 asks us to About the Play......................................................................................................3 consider: what is the Meet the Author ..................................................................................................4 real cost of war?” The Story ................................................................................................................5 The Characters......................................................................................................6 —Peter Meineck, director The Production ....................................................................................................7 In the Bombardier’s Seat ..................................................................................8 Historical Background........................................................................................9 A Duty to Die?....................................................................................................10 Before, During, & After ..................................................................................11 Be Prepared!........................................................................................................12 Keynotes are made possible by a generous grant from Bank of America Charitable Foundation. Keynotes are produced by the Education Department of the State Theatre, New The State Theatre’s education program is funded in part by Bank of America Charitable Foundation, Brunswick, NJ. Bristol-Myers Squibb, Brother International Corporation,The Horizon Foundation for New Jersey, Wesley Brustad, President Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, J. Seward Johnson, Sr. 1963 Charitable Trust, The Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation, McCrane Foundation, Lian Farrer, Vice President for Education MetLife Foundation, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, National Starch and Chemical Foundation, Inc., PNC Keynotes for Catch-22 written and designed Foundation, Provident Bank Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Verizon, and Wachovia Foundation. Their support is gratefully acknowledged. by Lian Farrer © 2007 State Theatre Funding has been made possible in part by Continental Airlines is the official the New Jersey State Council on the airline of the State Theatre. The State Theatre, a premier nonprofit venue Arts/Department of State, a partner agency for the performing arts and entertainment. of the National Endowment for the Arts. 2 About the Play The play, Catch-22, was adapted by Joseph Heller from his novel of the same name. During World War II, Heller had been stationed in Italy with the U.S. Army Air Corps and flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier. He drew on this experience in writing Catch-22, a satirical look at military bureaucracy and the insanity of war. Published in 1961, during the Vietnam War, the novel was controversial both for its criticism of the military and for its complicated, convoluted narrative structure. The novel was a landmark in American culture; the phrase “catch-22” has become part of our vocabulary, used to describe any situation where whatever choice you make, you lose. Many believed that Heller’s absurdist, non-linear story could not be told effectively onstage. This belief—along with the disappointing reception of the 1970 film Doc Daneeka and Yossarian adaptation of the novel—kept the play from becoming widely known. It received one small production, at the John Drew Theater in East Hampton, NY, in 1971, but never made it to Broadway, as Heller had originally intended. The performance you’ll be seeing, by Aquila Theatre Company, is the first-ever professional touring production of the play. Realizing that it would be impossible to cover all of the characters and “I thought this was a episodes in the novel in a 2fi-hour play, Heller made some changes in adapting his story for the stage. In the play, the story does not jump around great, undiscovered as much nor repeat itself as much as it does in the novel. A number of American play that characters and plot lines have been left out, but the essential elements of the original book are all there. needs to be done.” —Peter Meineck Meet the Director Catch-22 is directed by Peter Meineck, Artistic Director of Aquila Theatre. Originally from London, Meineck lives in New York and teaches Greek literature, ancient drama, and classical mythology at New York University. He founded Aquila Theatre in 1991 and has since been involved as producer, director, lighting designer, writer, and/or translator for nearly 40 Aquila productions. Having himself served in the military (the Royal British Marines), Meineck was attracted to Joseph Heller’s story about the insanity of war. “It asks the question of why do we fight wars, and who benefits from wars, and why are wars fought today,” he says. “You could argue that Heller was the first one to really define the military-industrial complex. Yet he doesn’t denigrate soldiers. He respects them.” Meineck says that his objective in staging this rarely-seen drama is “to make a very entertaining play very funny, but also thought-provoking.” 3 Meet the Author The American writer Joseph Heller was born into a poor Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1923. After graduating from high school in 1941, he enlisted in the Army Air Force—less than a year after the United States had entered World War II. Trained as a bombardier, Heller was sent to Corsica in 1944, where he flew sixty missions. After the war Heller attended New York University on the G.I. bill, a program that provided educational opportunities for returning World War II veterans. He went on to get a master's degree in English from Columbia University and then attended Oxford University in England as a Fulbright scholar. Returning to New York, Heller worked at a number of writing jobs (including one at an advertising agency) before publishing a few short stories in Esquire and the Atlantic Monthly. One of these stories provided the seed for Catch-22, a darkly Joseph Heller in 1961 comic antiwar novel. In Catch-22, Heller drew upon his own experience as a bomber pilot in World War II to present a satirical view of war and bureaucracy. The book received mixed reviews when it was first published in 1961, but soared in popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s as its themes found a receptive audience in the Vietnam War era. Critical acclaim grew as well. Controversial for its ideas, attitudes, and literary More War style, Catch-22 went on to become a major influence on literature, political thought, and popular culture. Its title is now a part of our everyday Stories vocabulary. WORLD WAR I: Heller wrote five additional novels, including Something Happened (1974), All Quiet on the Western Good As Gold (1979), and Closing Time (1994), a sequel to Catch-22, as well Front, by Erich Maria Remarque as short stories, plays, screenplays, and the 1998 memoir Now and Then. Like The Good Soldier Svejk, by Jaroslav Hasek Catch-22, much of his writing draws on incidents and characters from Heller’s own life, painting a satirical, often absurd picture of middle-class America. For WORLD WAR II: his use of irony and black Mister Roberts, by Thomas Heggen humor Heller is often grouped with the authors Kurt Vonnegut, The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer Thomas Pynchon, and Philip “People go to fight Roth. wars because they Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut In 1981, Heller was KOREAN WAR: diagnosed with Guillian-Barré don't understand Syndrome, which left him the seriousness of M*A*S*H, by Richard Hooker severely paralyzed. He VIETNAM WAR: eventually made a full recovery. what they're doing.” Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Myers He died of a heart attack in 1999 at the age of 76. —Joseph Heller The Things They Carried, by Tim OÕBrien 4 The Story Catch-22 is the story of Yossarian, an American Air Force bombardier stationed on Pianosa (a small island off the coast of Italy) during World War II. He finds himself caught in a crazy, terrifying maze of military bureaucracy from which there seems to be no escape. Sent out again and again on the most dangerous missions by a power-hungry colonel who is more interested in gaining a promotion than in winning the war, Yossarian decides that the enemy is not just the Germans who fire at his plane, but “anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on...” That includes his commander, Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions his officers are required to fly before they can be sent home. As he keeps a grim tally of the members of his squadron who are killed or missing in action, Yossarian keeps looking for ways
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