A play based on the novel by Dalton Trumbo
Advance ticket sales start: June 09, 2026
German translation by Johanna Wais | Adaptation by Bradley R. Smith
Joe Bonham, a young US soldier, is nearly killed by a grenade in Europe during World War I. Nearly, because Joe loses his arms and legs, his face, his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.
He can neither see nor hear, nor can he speak; only his torso and brain have survived the explosion and the medical operations. Joe can think; waking up in a hospital bed, he grasps his situation, he feels the fabric on his skin, the draft in the room, and touches, he can remember—the war, his childhood, his parents, his first love—but he cannot make himself understood.
Trapped in his own body, he realizes that he is being misused by the doctors as a sensation, indeed as an object for study. But Joe finds a way to communicate. He demands his right to a dignified death.
On September 3, 1939, just two days after the start of World War II, 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, terrible book: brutal yet full of poetry, infinitely cruel, but full of love. No one had ever told of war as relentlessly as Trumbo, yet also so movingly of the beauty and values of life. Just a few years later, thousands of Americans would refuse to bear arms with reference to Johnny Got His Gun.
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