Adaptations Weaken Vonnegut’s ‘Monkey House’

They’ve monkeyed around with Kurt Vonnegut Jr.--his short stories, that is--but the author doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, Vonnegut himself introduces “Kurt Vonnegut’s Monkey House” (at 9 tonight on Showtime, with repeats Wednesday and May 20). But like the most of the show, the introduction tries for a puckish charm that ends up being most uninviting.

The strange title derives from Vonnegut’s short story collection, “Welcome to the Monkey House,” from which three tales have been (sometimes radically) adapted. Vonnegut wrote them in the 1950s, through the prisms of the Cold War and new technological breakthroughs.

Of the three, though, only the first, “Next Door,” has been kept in its period. Curiously, Vonnegut’s punchy, quick-cutting original is far more cinematic than Jeremy Hole’s script or Paul Shapiro’s direction, with Kaj-Erik Erikson doing his best Macaulay Culkin impersonation as a boy alone at home while the neighbors are fighting.

This, however, is inspired compared to the next piece, “The Euphio Question.” Vonnegut’s coy morality tale, exploring what happens when people decide to buy rather than pursue happiness, is flattened by Gilbert Shilton’s thudding direction and a character-less cast led by Gordon Clapp. Jeffrey Cohen’s scripted updates--a radio broadcast beaming a signal that produces euphoria in the listener’s mind has been changed to a TV, for example--make sense, but his dramatization has lost the original’s giddy paranoia.

“All The King’s Horses,” set by Vonnegut in a Cold War-mired Asia where imprisoned Americans are literally used as pawns in a bloody chess match, demanded updating. Writer Stan Daniels’ solution to shift the action to present-day Latin America and an atmosphere of failed communism adds irony and heft to the original story’s uncertain ending. Yet despite Len Cariou’s achingly fine portrayal of an anguished U.S. ambassador, director Allan King misses every chance to visually heighten a natural movie story.