Contemporary American Playwrights - David Rabe

Brook had no interest in a Theatre of Fact, believing documentaries to be the business of other media inthat he contrasted with the German author Peter Weiss, whose  play, Discourse

 

David Rabe

‘There are times,’ wrote Peter Brook, ‘when I am nauseated by thetheatre, when its artificiality appals me, although at the very samemoment I recognize that its formality is its strength.’ He was speaking inthe context of a play inspired by a distant war in which his own countryallegedly had no direct involvement He, and others, however, ‘quite sud-denly felt that Vietnam was more powerful, more acute, more insistent

a situation than any drama that already existed between covers’.1

It is notable that one of the first plays about Vietnam (US, ) was

staged not in the United States, and not by a politically radical theatrecompany, but in England, and by a state-subsidised theatre whose repu-tation was built on productions of Elizabethan drama, though, underBrook, the Royal Shakespeare Company was in the middle of a period

of experimentation in part inspired by the theories of Antonin Artaud.Admittedly, the Open Theatre’s Joseph Chaikin was in England for the

performance (the Open Theatre which produced Megan Terry’s Viet Rock) Admittedly, too, in that same year, the director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, R.G Davis, writing in the Tulane Drama Review,

called for the creation of what he called ‘Guerrilla Theatre’ The same

issue of this journal included a one-page proposed play called Kill Viet Cong, in which a man, apparently a member of the audience, is invited

to shoot a Viet Cong soldier.2But at that stage the American theatre wasonly just beginning to respond to the developing war, with the Bread andPuppet Theatre joining public rallies, and the Living Theatre drawing

on images from Vietnam in Paradise Now ( ) and Commune ().

Davis begins his article by quoting Freud’s observation that ‘Art isalmost always harmless and beneficent; it does not seek to be anythingelse but an illusion Save in the case of a few people who are, one might



1Peter Brook, The Shifting Point: Forty Years of Theatrical Exploration – (London, ), p .

2R G Davis, ‘Guerrilla Theatre’, Tulane Drama Review,, (Summer ), p .

say, obsessed by art, it never dares to make any attacks on the realm ofreality’ (‘Guerrilla Theatre’, p.) He accuses the American theatre inparticular of lacking such an obsession, before outlining plans whichsound remarkably like a defence of the Mime Troupe’s own mode ofoperations Within two years he was personally inviting audiences totake to the streets with guns It was, nonetheless, Peter Brook’s produc-

tion of US, followed by the film version, which arguably had the

great-est impact

For Brook:

all theatre as we know it fails to touch the issues that can most powerfullyconcern actors and audiences at the actual moment when they meet Forcommon sense is outraged by the supposition that old wars in old words aremore living than new ones, that ancient atrocities make civilized after-dinner

fare, whilst current atrocities are not worthy of attention (Brook, The Shifting

Point, p.)

But his doubts went deeper than a conviction that theatre avoids the temporary, that while operating in the present tense it deploys the lan-guage and methodology of the past He feared that ‘No work of art hasyet made a better man’, indeed that ‘the more barbaric the people themore they appear to appreciate the arts’ (p.) These last remarks aretaken from what he chose to call his ‘Manifesto for the Sixties’, and areclearly not as absolutist as they seem, since he then set himself to create

con-a series of productions which sought, con-as he explcon-ained, to ‘mcon-ake us loseour balance’, to ‘help us see better’ (p.) Nor was he offering a critique

of Shakespeare, for example, but of what the theatre had chosen tomake of Shakespeare As he observed, ‘the dead man moves, we stay still It is not the Shakespearean method that interests us It is theShakespearean ambition The ambition to question people and society

in action, in relation to human existence’ (p.)

It was that ambition which lay behind the production of US A gro up

of twenty-five actors, working with a number of writers, spent severalmonths exploring the Vietnamese situation The play itself emergedfrom a fifteen-week rehearsal period Brook had no interest in a Theatre

of Fact, believing documentaries to be the business of other media (inthat he contrasted with the German author Peter Weiss, whose 

play, Discourse on Vietnam, set out to offer what was in effect a politically

committed history of Vietnam from pre-Christian times to the present).His aim was not propaganda, though he was later accused of this inthe United States He wished to confront the audience with the gapbetween the horrors of Vietnam and ordinary life, an objective which

culminated, at the end of the production, when ‘all pretences of acting ceased and actor and audience together paused, at a momentwhen they and Vietnam were looking one another in the face’ (Brook,

play-The Shifting Point, p.) This moment was not offered as an accusation

or reproach, though there were those who took it as such, but as anopportunity, for actors and audience alike, to question where they stood

in relation to what they had seen

There is, perhaps, a deal of naivety here, not least in the notion thatthe actors could lay aside all pretence of play-acting Indeed, in that pro-tracted period of silence (ten or fifteen minutes) the audience was itselfturned into so many actors, performing for the benefit of those who sur-rounded them and even for themselves What is interesting is Brook’sattempt to find some way in which subject matter as powerful as hewished to present could be communicated Elsewhere in the piece abutterfly was supposedly set alight, inspiring a familiar British response,since for the British animals are liable to come somewhere above man inthe chain of being And though this was doubtless part of Brook’s cal-culation, as audiences were asked to confront the discrepancy betweentheir immediate alarm for the insect (in fact made of paper) and theirmore distant concern for those dying, or immolating themselves inVietnam (in the film version a monk in Vietnam and a Quaker inWashington are seen burning themselves to death), even for those lessnaive the gesture was potentially distracting as technical questionsmomentarily displaced moral ones Such moments, though, weredesigned to create what elsewhere he has referred to as ‘an acid burn’

(The Shifting Point, p.), for he believes that it is not enough to state ideas,they have to be burnt into the memory, whether that idea is MotherCourage drawing her cart or two tramps under a tree

The play’s ambiguous title was designed to bring home to Britishaudiences their own responsibility for events supposedly that of others.Even after stage and film versions, however, Brook could not convincehimself that theatre had the power to shift the course of history

It is said that The Marriage of Figaro launched the French Revolution, but I don’t

believe it I don’t believe that plays and films and works of art operate this way

Goya’s Disasters of War and Picasso’s Guernica have always seemed the great

models, yet they achieved no practical results Perhaps we do ourselves a greatdisservice in pitching the question so falsely Will this act of protest stop thekilling? we ask, knowing that it won’t, yet half hoping that in a miraculous way

it might Then it doesn’t, and we feel cheated Is the act, then, worth making?

Is there a choice? (The Shifting Point, p.)

That last question is clearly rhetorical, for he believes, and says, that

‘truth is a radical remedy’ (p.), while aware that truth is not so easilyrecuperated But there is a more profound problem having to do withthe consequence of shifting experience from the moral to the aesthetic

sphere US took its place in the RSC and Peter Brook’s exploration of theatrical possibilities It followed his production of the Marat/Sade

() and preceded his radical revisioning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream() It bears the marks of his exposure to Artaud The theatre, afterall, has its own logic and procedures, its own imperatives, casuistries andhonesties And in common with the other arts it has the greatestdifficulty in approaching extreme situations, though Brook himselfcalled precisely for a theatre of extremes Vietnam posed such a problem

to the dramatist but then so, too, did the Holocaust Where is the manding play about the Second World War?

com-It is not hard to see the attraction of the Theatre of Fact com-It has thevirtue if not of unmediated fact, since the writer becomes an editor, then

at least of apparently reducing aesthetic contamination But it ders other possibilities which depend precisely on distorting the literal,

surren-on plunging down into fractured psyches Like Peter Weiss’s play it isdrawn to the epic, to historicity, chronicity Even allowing for the pow-erful authenticity that is a product of testimony, however, it necessarilyabjures visions, dreams, nightmares, the inexpressible trauma It deniesitself the communicative power of fantasy, of a theatre in which lan-guage may work against action, character be problematic, truth be aproduct not of verifiable event but wilful distortion This was a sacrificethat a playwright who grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, was not prepared tomake, a man who had traded an ambition to be a professional footballplayer for graduate training in theatre at Villanova and who, on drop-ping out, had been drafted to Vietnam

When Peter Brook was staging US in London, creating metaphors out

of burning butterflies, David Rabe was serving in a hospital support unit

at Long Binh or working as a guard, clerk, driver or construction worker

For a time, like the protagonist of The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, he

tried to secure a transfer to a combat unit He was not, in other words,

a reluctant soldier As he later explained, ‘like Pavlo at the time I wasdrafted, unless you were fairly politically astute, there was no war Itdidn’t exist It was about to exist in a big way, but it didn’t.’3 He wasdrafted in  and served in  He tried to keep a journal but failed,

3Eric Schroeder, ed., Vietnam: We’ve All Been There (Westport, CT,), p .

too aware of the gap between available language and the experience hewanted to describe: ‘I was acutely aware, and in a way that makes writingimpossible, of the existence of language as mere symbol.’4Unable pre-cisely to capture the sound of cannon, the dust that fell from the tent-folds, ‘in an utterly visceral way, I detested any lesser endeavor Theevents around me, huge and continual, were the things obsessing me’

(Basic Training, p xvii) His attempts to write ‘resulted in a kind of double

vision that made everything too intense’.5 To transmute disturbingevents into language was to do violence to both: ‘not only to see the deadand crippled, the bodies, beggars, lepers, but to replay in your skull theirdesperation and the implications of their pain’ This ‘seemed a lunaticjourney’ (p xvii) Even his letters, he has confessed, grew more prosaicand fraudulent

Rabe was born, in , in Dubuque, Iowa, of Catholic parents Both

in high school and at university (first Loras College in Iowa and then,after , Villanova in Pennsylvania), he had a reputation as a buddingwriter, in  one of his plays, Bridges, receiving a workshop production

He was drafted at the age of twenty-five, having flirted with the idea ofbecoming a conscientious objector At the time, though, he regarded thewar as a just cause Once there, he responded ambiguously In his inval-uable study of Rabe’s stage history,6Philip C Kolin draws attention to

his remark in a Newsweek interview in which he explained his refusal to

accept a leadership role: ‘I turned down the job of squad leader because

I was willing to go along with the system, but not enforce it’ (Kolin, David Rabe, p.) He saw no combat, though initially wishing to do so As heexplained, ‘’I had wanted to go on the line After two months I changed

my mind It took about two months for a lot of things to start going sour– a lot of attitudes I went over with’ (p.) Attached to a hospital unit,

he began to see the consequences of combat: ‘truckloads of humanlimbs and piles of green uniforms The impact was terrific on anyonewho was over there’ (p.)

On his return, like the protagonist of Hemingway’s ‘Soldier’s Home’,

he found it difficult to function: ‘Coming home was traumatic, findingbusiness going on as usual For a while I couldn’t talk to anyone whohadn’t been over there’ (p.) This was the mood he later captured in

Sticks and Bones, in which the normality of home becomes its own kind of

nightmare, an affront, a wilful blindness

4David Rabe, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones (New York,), p xvi.

5David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York,), p .

6Philip C Kolin, David Rabe: A Stage History and a Primary and Secondary Bibliography (New York,).

He briefly returned to graduate school before leaving again, this time

to become a reporter He had been home for six months before hethought of drawing on his Vietnam experiences Having failed to write

a journal he turned not to drama but the novel, regarding theatre as

‘lightweight, all fluff and metaphor, spangle, posture, and glittercrammed into a form as rigid as any machine geared to reproduce theshape of itself endlessly’ Theatrical form, he felt, seemed artificial

‘beyond what was necessary’ (Savran, In Their Own Words, p xiii).

Ironically, it was precisely the artifice, the self-referentiality, the phor that ultimately resolved his problem

meta-In  he was in New Haven as a reporter for the New Haven Register

As Barnett Kellman, who later directed a version of The Orphan, has

pointed out, at that time Bobby Seale and six other defendants were ontrial for murder in that city, Yale University was temporarily closed and

a so-called Revolutionary Congress was called The year before hadbeen marked by riots, the Manson killings in California and news of the

My Lai massacre Rabe felt himself ambivalently placed, unable to pathise with the war but equally repelled by those who protested itwithout knowing of its reality In an article on draft resisters, quoted byKolin, he described them as having ‘the rage of duped and frustrated

sym-lo ve in them, the will to vengeance of the scared child’ (Kolin, David Rabe, p.) Asked to review two studies of the My Lai massacre, he pro-

duced an unlikely mélange of review, dream, diary and vision:

I am twenty-nine It is Monday May Spring There is a pencil Dusk In mydream, where I matter, I have conversations with cats, trees, stones, otherpeople, and we agree upon things I ask atoms what they are I tell them thatknowing what I know is not good enough I must know what I do not know There’s more that I must write More that points the way to the rim of a gunbarrel The tip of a muzzle The tip of the lead that lies packed in powder I’ll

go to the editor – tell him the point of these books is bullets I want to do areview to hurt people The design, I’ll yell, should be bullets!7

Whatever its impact on the editor of the New Haven Register, the piece

reveals Rabe’s stylistic solution to the problem of integrating hisVietnam experience into his work He turned his back on realism

He had begun work on his plays in  An early version of what was

to become The Orphan was produced at Villanova University, in

Philadelphia, in , under the title The Bones of Birds The Basic Training

of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones were largely finished by , by

7Barnett Kellman, ‘David Rabe: The Orphan, a Peripatetic Work in Progress’, Theatre Quarterly, (Spring ), p .

which time he had also completed a further draft of The Orphan and part

of Streamers His problem was that, on his return to America, he found

himself at first in a society that seemed to have no interest in Vietnam(‘Everybody seemed totally removed from the war’) and then in one inwhich the reality of the war disappeared in the issue of the war ratherthan its reality (‘People were interested in simplifications, in the debate

about the war rather than in the experience of the war itself ’) (Savran,

In Their Own Words, p.) The fact was that he had no interest in writing

a polemical work As he explained in :

The writing I did in college was dominated by an urge to interpret the world toitself, to give the world a sermon that would bring it back to its truest self, for Ithought then (and I did indeed believe it) that the history and exact nature ofboth mankind and the world were known, universal, eternal I no longer writefrom that urge (though I’m sure some of it lingers) but try to start instead from

the wish to discover (Basic Training, p xi)

Though his reputation was, for many years, based on what came to beknown as his Vietnam trilogy, Rabe was not a writer of protest plays, not

a polemicist rallying people to the cause in the way that R.G Davis hadproposed His was not guerilla theatre, except in so far as he waged war

on ignorance and denial The plays he wrote were attempts to stand, to find a form and a language in which he could explore an expe-rience that he had found impossible to penetrate or express when itsreality was part of his daily life

under-The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, effectively the first of not a trilogybut a quartet of plays inspired by his experience of the war and its after-math, and which was initially rejected by many of America’s regionaland experimental theatres, though going on to win an Obie Award, con-cerns the induction of a young man into the army and his brief time inVietnam It is not realistic, though the documentary impulse was a pow-erful presence in the first act which went into rehearsal at Joe Papp’sPublic Theatre, not least because Rabe still felt the pressure to reportthat had led him to attempt a journal back in Vietnam At first Pappurged him to break down the play’s linear nature Rabe resisted, partly,

he has explained, because he had already finished a draft of The Orphan, which dealt in fantasy and theatricality, and hence felt the need for The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel to sink its roots more securely into realism:

‘It would be the base from which I moved outward with other work I

felt Pavlo, the first written, had to be a play that was primarily aboutpeople Therefore I wanted it done in the theatrical form in which dra-matic characters had the best chance of appearing as simply people’

(Basic Training, pp xiv–xv) In the course of rehearsals, however, he came

to accept the logic of Papp’s suggestions, the impressionism of thesecond act infiltrating the first, the stylistic gulf being closed

The set is described as a space whose floor consists of slats laid out,appropriately, with a military precision It is dominated by the drillsergeant’s tower, from which he instructs the recruits It is ‘stark and real-

istic’ (Basic Training, p.), an unassailable fact, in contrast to action which

is, at times, dreamlike, surreal In this space, itself a kind of stage, all ofwhose elements are to have ‘some military tone to them, some echo ofbasic training’ (p.), private and public dramas are enacted The army

is, in effect, teaching Pavlo and the other recruits to act He is trained invoice, language, movement He is costumed and given a part to play in

a drama not of his own devising The theatricality that Rabe had tially resisted becomes a central mechanism

ini-Though the play was carefully constructed, and then reconstructed inrehearsal, it gives the impression of feelings and perceptions even nownot fully under control Discipline and anarchy do battle Violence isacted out but its meaning remains in some sense opaque to its centralcharacter, Pavlo He is no less bemused by the world in which he movesthan is the ordered country which unleashes, and is the victim of, disor-der The play is a montage of moments which never quite come together

to form a coherent picture, at least not for the man who struggles tomake sense of such alien experiences He is like Saul Bellow’s danglingman, welcoming regimentation as a relief from alienation He looks formeaning in the role he is given, but finds none as the world disintegratesaround him A fellow soldier is dismantled, like Nathanael West’sLemuel Pitkin, losing limbs and his will to live Pavlo himself looks for acoherence in his life that never comes He exists in a space that can beinvaded at any moment by elements over which he has no control Nevermarching to a different drummer, he is an agent and not a principal Hefails to forge relationships with others which go beyond immediate andself-limiting physical needs He has no private system of morality tocounterpose to the contingency of the world through which he moves.Life, for him, is no more than a defence of the self, with no perception

of what that self might be

Pavlo Hummel himself appears to be an innocent, exposed to the talities and injustices of the world, a Woyzeck, wandering through analien world, though his ignorance of Vietnam was shared by Rabe at the

bru-time of his drafting: ‘Like in this scene fairly early in Pavlo, I remember

a sergeant talking about Vietnam, and we were all saying, “What?

Where? What’s he talking about?’’ ’ (Schroeder, ed., Vietnam, p.) ButPavlo’s innocence is closer to naivety As his brother suggests, he is ‘weird

a myth-maker a goddamn cartoon’ (Basic Training, pp.–)

He lies, steals, is incompetent, contemptuous of others There is, in otherwords, no pure America corrupted by war in this play, no true innocence

to be violated Pavlo is an orphan estranged from his mother, incapable

of making relationships The army offers him the companionship he hasfailed to find elsewhere, a role that has evaded him, a myth he caninhabit But it also represents the chance of extinction for which hismother believes him to be searching

Rabe himself has said that, ‘if the character of Pavlo Hummel doesnot have a certain eagerness and wide-eyed spontaneity, along with atrue, real and complete inability to grasp the implications of what hedoes, the play will not work as it can Pavlo is in fact lost He has, for along time, no idea that he is lost His own perceptions define the world’

(Basic Training, p.) In one sense, indeed, it is tempting to say thatVietnam is almost an irrelevance Certainly, taken outside the immedi-ate context of the s and read through the caustic ironies of Rabe’s

later play, Hurlyburly, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel seems to offer a

portrait not just of a country deformed by war but an America deeply

at odds with itself, a society in which the shaping order of myth seemspreferable to the anarchy which otherwise seems to prevail Certainlyhere, and in his later plays, loss seems a central theme, as if somethinghad disappeared from America long before the Vietnam war: somecohesiveness, some sense of meaning beyond self-gratification

Pavlo Hummel is an extreme case but he shares with his culture anattraction for fantasy and a consoling sense of community, less real than

an expression of need His own arrogant chauvinism has its reflection inthe wider society, with its misogyny and its racism Seen thus, Vietnammerely acts as a special case, a metaphor for a deeper sense of aliena-tion and estrangement At the same time, war raises the stakes Underits pressure both society and the individual are forced to define them-selves

The play runs time backwards, in so far as it starts with Hummel’sdeath He is killed, it later transpires, by a fellow soldier in a Vietnamesebrothel From the beginning, therefore, order is inverted, abstract prin-ciples subordinated to more basic instincts He then springs back to life,summoned by Ardell, a black soldier, ‘his uniform strangely unreal’, aswell it might be since he drifts in and out of the action, a mentor, chorus,phantasm He is a guide, a commentator, simultaneously real and a

product of myth, an angel of death summoned into existence by Pavlo’sneed He is a device for pulling together discrete incidents, as are the mil-itary drills which punctuate the action.

The second act is more brutally direct than the first Sergeant Brisbey,who has lost both legs and an arm to a landmine, begs Pavlo to kill him

A young private is tortured to death by Viet Cong who remind him thatAmerican bombers had killed their own friends Pavlo shoots aVietnamese farmer and is himself knifed He learns certain truths: ‘we

tear We rip apart we tear’ (Basic Training, p.) As Ardell insists, ‘theknowledge comin’, baby I’m talkin’ about what your kidney know, notyour fuckin’ fool’s head We melt; we tear and rip apart’ (p.) Pavlolearns his own vulnerability and that of others but still, and in contra-diction, clings to the idea of his own final invulnerability, to the beliefthat killing can neutralise killing He never learns the truth that Ardelloffers: ‘When you shot into his head, you hit into your own head, fool!’(p.) As Rabe has said, ‘It is Pavlo’s body that changes His physicalefficiency, even his mental efficiency increases, but insight never comes he will learn only that he is lost, not how, why, or even where Histalent is for leaping into the fire’ (Basic Training, p ) And not him

alone, in that these comments might be extended to America

But the play is not primarily offered as such an indictment This is not

a play that explores political motives It does not offer an indictmentbeyond that which it directs at those who choose to be blind to eventsand the meaning of those events As Pavlo’s body is carried to be laid in

an aluminium coffin, Ardell intones an epitaph that underscores not somuch Pavlo’s failure of understanding as that of those back in America,from his mother and brother to his one-time girlfriend, Joanna:

Finally he get shipped home, and his mother cry a lot, and his brother get sodamn depressed about it all And Joanna, she read his name in the paper, shelet out this little gasp and say to her husband across the table, ‘Jesus, Jimmy, Iused to go with that boy Oh, damn that war, why can’t we have peace? I thinkI’ll call his mother.’ Ain’t it some kind of world? what you think of the cause?What you think of gettin’ your ass blown clean off a freedom’s frontier? Andwhat you think a all the ‘folks back home’, sayin’ you a victim you a animal

you a fool? (Basic Training, p.)

The play ends with the coffin, on an empty stage, ‘in real light’ (p ).That reality, though, is never apparent to Pavlo

Ardell’s final speech reflected Rabe’s own position As he has said,

Even though the plays were part of a political movement, in them I was trying

to express what I thought I was saying: You can do what you want about the

war But don’t lie about it Don’t pretend that it’s good, or it becomes uglier than

it is Don’t pretend it’s heroic Don’t pretend that everybody who goes over there

is a monster or a hero Most of the kids didn’t know anything about what was

going on (Savran, In Their Own Words, p.)

Pavlo’s unawareness was that of many of those who went to Vietnamand even more of those who stayed behind

The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel is about the difficulty of ing the world, of finding a language that can explain it, of knowing howother people’s lives connect with our own, of relating events to themeaning of those events, of acknowledging our power to act and our

understand-responsibility for so acting It is a play about Vietnam but, as Hurlyburly

would show, estrangement, alienation and a callous disregard for theother were not a product of a distant war Indeed, looking back from thelate s, Rabe remarked that, ‘There was in those plays a social con-sciousness of some kind But I think the plays refuse to be as simple

as the social necessities would dictate I guess I don’t think that DavidMamet would be any bleaker in his view of social development than I

am’ (Savran, In Their Own Words, p.)

Rabe finished the first draft of the play in , the year of the Tetoffensive in Vietnam, the year, in other words, that Americans becameaware that the war could be lost, as Viet Cong troups invaded theembassy compound in Saigon It was the year before Lieutenant Calleyand his company undermined the idealistic rhetoric applied to the war

by slaughtering men, women and children at My Lai, though Rabe waslater anxious to insist that the play, in origin, had preceded these events.But though Rabe’s play was not a protest work contemporary audienceswould unavoidably have experienced it through their awareness of thoseunfolding events

The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel was staged at the Public Theatre in

 Six months later his second play, Sticks and Bones, also opened at the

Public, though an earlier draft had been staged at Villanova in  Ittransferred to Broadway in March of the following year This is a playthat also comes, in part, out of Rabe’s own bafflement at the Americanresponse to Vietnam Though his tour was relatively uneventful, on hisreturn, after a brief period, he began to be disturbed by the response ofthose around him: ‘it was like going to Mars Because what you walkedinto was this unbelievable incomprehension and indifference that youjust simply couldn’t fathom You thought you were going home, and you

came back to something else’ (Schroeder, ed., Vietnam, p.)

Sticks and Bones is an account of the return of a Vietnam veteran.

Blinded in the war, he comes back to a family that is conventional to thepoint of parody Indeed, the characters are based on figures from apopular radio and television comedy which ran for twenty years.Desperate to sustain their own version of normality, they try to ignorehis blindness, his bizarre behaviour and what they take to be the virus of

an alien experience Against the anarchy that enters their home they try

to pitch the trivia of daily routine, a Saturday Evening Post version of the

American way Indeed we are told that the house in which the action isset seems to ‘belong in the gloss of an advertisement’ It is, according to

the stage directions, the ‘family home’ (Basic Training, p.), but boththose terms prove problematic as an American family falls apart andhome is the site of anxiety, violence and callousness Yet a surface equa-nimity is maintained Nothing is too painful that it cannot be eased away

by a bowl of ice cream and hot fudge or exorcised by religion But if thisfamily prays together it manifestly does not stay together It is blownapart by the inconvenient presence of a family member who no longerrecognises his role, who intrudes ideas, values and anxieties at odds with

a bland existence, and whose language leads them into depths theywould rather not probe In the end their desire to blot him out is taken

to its logical conclusion as they encourage his suicide

In one sense there is something familiar about this portrait of a family

destroying itself, with distant echoes of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and closer ones from Albee’s The American Dream The parents in

this play, as in Albee’s, reject their son because he fails any longer to givesatisfaction, to conform to the model of behaviour they expect He is, asRabe has indicated, ‘no longer lovable’, so they no longer love him Hedamages their self-image as a happy family, denies those aspects ofthemselves that they believe to be of value He undermines the very idea

of the family itself, a central icon of their society and the origin of theirbelief that role and personal meaning are directly related

Beyond O’Neill and Albee, there appears to be a reference to another

classic play that takes the family as a central icon, Arthur Miller’s Death

of a Salesman David Rabe has acknowledged his admiration for Miller, particularly for After the Fall and A View from the Bridge, citing his moral

complexity, rather than his technique or his dramatic construction Infact, though, it is tempting to see something of the fluidity of construc-

tion of The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel as coming precisely from After the Fall But Sticks and Bones, perhaps, takes us back to his earlier classic,

for here is a play about a family with two sons, one an empty-headedhedonist, the other anguished, with a touch of the poet Here, too, as in

Miller’s play, is a drama in which a version of the American dream isexposed under the pressure of needs that cannot be fully acknowledged,

in the face of realities so at odds with familiar pieties Indeed, Harriet isgiven a speech reminiscent of Linda Loman’s when she says, ‘Ohh, it’s

so good to hear men’s voices in the house again, my two favorite men in

all the world – it’s what I live for really’ (Basic Training, p.) (‘It was sothrilling to see them leaving together I can’t get over the smell of shavinglotion in this house!’8) Linda tries to maintain a facade, to deny her fear,but where she has resources of her own and is motivated by love, inRabe’s play love is no more than a word Harriet has no substance Shebuilds a wall of denial and calls it a home Ozzie, meanwhile, has some-thing of Willy Loman’s desire to leave his mark on the world, to findsome material correlative for his need for personal meaning: ‘I keephaving this notion of wanting some thing some material thing,and I’ve built it And then there’s this feeling I’m of value, that I’m on

my way and I’m going to come to something eventually, some kind

of an achievement’ (Basic Training, p.)

If Miller was an influence then so, too, was Ionesco, whose use of

lan-guage Rabe found compelling As in The Bald Prima Donna, words are

detached from context and lexical function, language is a shield againstmeaning The family exchange banalities in a parody of sociality (‘Hi,

Mom Hi, Dad/ Hi, Rick!/ Hi, Mom./ Hi, Rick./ Hi, Dad’ (Basic Training, p.) As in the work of Ionesco and Albee, everything is madeexplicit Characters describe their feelings, often at length Yet little ofthis communicates Indeed, part of the play’s effect comes from the dis-junction between what is said and how the other characters respond AsRabe remarks in an Author’s Note, ‘David throws a yelling, screamingtantrum over his feelings of isolation and Harriet confidently, cheerfullyoffers Ezy Sleep sleeping pills in full faith that this will solve his problem.The actors,’ he instructs, ‘ must not physically ignore things Thepoint is not that they do not physically see or hear, but that they psycho-logically ignore’ (p ) Only by ignoring what they see, as Davidreveals the horrors he has experienced and recalls the Vietnamese girl

he had loved and abandoned, can they sustain their sense of the world.The play begins with a framing scene On a dark stage a number ofslides are projected The slides include pictures of Ozzie and Harriet atthe age of eight or nine In the darkness a man, a woman and two chil-dren comment on the photographs, the last two clearly being Ozzie’s

8 Arthur Miller, The Portable Arthur Miller (New York,), p .

grandchildren We learn that Ozzie’s brother had died of scarlet fever,

an intrusion of death never mentioned in the rest of the play Thewoman then comments on another slide, identifying David as though hewere not known to her The implication is that those hidden in the dark-ness are Rick (David’s younger brother) and his wife and children, thenext generation American family The slide of David, in effect a flashforward to the final moment of the play, shows him with ‘a stricken look’.This is followed by another, which animates into the first scene of a play

in which Rick spends much of his time taking photographs (capturing areality in which he does not wish to involve himself) and a television setflickers upstage, projecting its images The implication is that images on

a screen, photographs, can never express the reality of the experiences

or the people they purport to present The picture of David is preted by one of the children as ‘somebody sick’ It takes the length ofthe play to understand what that ‘sickness’ consists of

inter-At the beginning of the play Harriet and Ozzie exchange tal memories of the son who is now to return to them, memories,though, tainted with menace (he had locked himself in an icebox andfallen from a tree), and anything but reassuring (‘He was a mean foul-tempered little baby’ (p.)) Ozzie’s response to the return of his son

sentimen-is to become defensive about hsentimen-is own failure to serve in the military, and

to boast about his own exploits, achievements no more significant thanoutrunning a bowling ball or beating a friend in a race In other words,the fear, anxiety, self-regard that are to emerge later in the play are allpresent in the first minutes

Rabe has denied any influence from Pinter while, curiously, ing that ‘I tried to graft certain things on because he was popular and his

indicat-techniques are very seductive’ (Savran, In Their Own Words, p. ).Failing to get his plays produced, Rabe had, pragmatically, studied thetechniques of those who did, and it is certainly very tempting to see morethan an echo of Pinter in this homecoming A door opens and a manenters, who by his very presence threatens an equanimity which is itselfillusory Violence is, for the most part, immanent rather than enacted,

though David strikes out with his white stick, as in The Caretaker, fo r

example, a knife is wielded though not used As in Pinter’s work, powershifts between the characters who, on occasion, are permitted extendedspeeches, oblique accounts of a past itself compacted with menace.Here, a knock at the door heralds the entrance of David and a ser-geant major, the latter offering a Pinteresque blend of politeness andaggression as he delivers David like an express package Indeed, his

language is that of a delivery man: ‘I got trucks out there backed up forblocks Other boys I got to get on to Chicago, and some of them toDenver and Cleveland, Reno, New Orleans, Boston, Trenton, Watts,Atlanta their backs broken, their brains jellied, their insides turned

into garbage I got deliveries to make all across this country’ (Basic Training, pp.–) Harriet responds to the shock of seeing her blind son

by insisting that his blindness is no more than a product of his tirednessfollowing a long trip She offers cake and coffee Ricky takes a photo-graph But someone else comes through the door with David, aVietnamese girl, invisible to Harriet and the others, the girl whom Davidcarries in his mind and whom he reproaches himself for abandoning.The family find it more difficult to accept that David has had a liaisonwith a Vietnamese woman than that he is blind or has been involved inextremes of violence (interestingly, in his introduction to the play Rabestresses the depth of Vietnamese racism, underlining the degree towhich the play is more than an attack on American attitudes) For him,she is the source of a poetry in his life: ‘there was this girl with hands andhair like wings There were candles above the net of gauze under which

we lay Lizards Cannon could be heard A girl to weigh no more thandust’ (pp –) A stage direction indicates that ‘the poetry is like athing possessing him’ (p.) It is what lifts him above the banality ofhis home and the horrors of the war For his parents, however, thethought of such miscegenation is an affront, a threat to their notions ofnormality They can only deal with it by reconstituting it linguistically.Where David inhabits poetry they inhabit prose By using a reductivelanguage they accommodate the threat, transforming the relationshipinto nothing more than a soldier’s response to biological need: ‘what youmean is you whored around a lot You banged some whores hadsome intercourse yo u shacked up with I mean hit on Dicked you pronged it, right? I mean it’s like going to the bathroom Allglands and secretions You screwed it A yellow whore You screwedsome yellow fucking whore!’ (p.) Beyond the family need to denywhat threatens them lies an assertion of the extent to which languageconstructs the reality it purports to describe As Rabe has said, ‘the fun-damental conflict is about how to talk about experience The familywant to use clichés David wants to use poetry The clichés are reductive

and poetry is expansive’ (Savran, In Their Own Words, p.)

The war itself, of course, was fought on the linguistic no less than themilitary level, with an array of pejorative terms for an enemy that couldthus be eliminated with fewer moral qualms But in some ways this was

slightly beside the point Indeed, for Rabe, the immediate realities ofVietnam made the play more difficult to stage It had, he pointed out,been staged first (at least in an early version) at Villanova in , before

My Lai Events had moved on Thus, speaking of Jeff Bleckner’s PublicTheatre production, he observed that,

maybe nobody during that period could have made it work the way I think itshould I think it should be made really, really funny – grotesque and funny in

an aggressive way At the time, audience and actors wanted to participate in themoral issues and so the theatrical nature of the piece couldn’t quite emerge The

cartoonish, grotesque and poetic have to collide in a theatrical way (Savran, In

Their Own Words, p.)

The problem became even greater when CBS television recorded theplay Its transmission was scheduled for a few weeks after the return ofprisoners of war Rabe himself was afraid that this special circumstance,accompanied by an outburst of patriotism, might make it difficult tounderstand the state of mind of the returned veteran Nonetheless hewas eager to proceed CBS, however, withdrew and the play was nottransmitted as scheduled

The fact is that Sticks and Bones, despite its ostensible subject matter, is

not simply concerned with Vietnam Interestingly, Joe Papp himselfonce remarked that, ‘the actors treated it as a serious play They all stillthink that it’s a play about Vietnam.’9 As if to confirm this, Raberesponded to an unauthorised Russian production of his play, under the

title As Brother is to Brother, by writing to the director to deny their

inter-pretation of the play as an account of a specifically American dilemma:

The play is about you and your people, or it is about nothing If you do not findyourself in it, either you lie or it does If you find only the United States in it,then you fail to see it or fail to see yourselves If I lived in Russia, I wouldhave written it about Russia, but I live here There is little that I like or dislikeabout this country that I do not find in myself (Little, Enter Joseph Papp, p )

That last remark is especially interesting in that it proposes an lence which transcends an analysis of the play that turns either on thenotion that it is an anti-war play, or the idea that it offers a simple satire

ambiva-of American values ambiva-of the kind evident in Albee’s The American Dream.

Vietnam does lie at its centre We are offered a brutally direct tion of the murder of two people and the killing of a child in the womb

descrip-David resists his mother’s suggestion that he should ‘just be happy’ (Basic

9Stuart W.Little, Enter Joseph Papp: In Search of a New American Theater (New York,), p .

Training, p.), by asking whether it should be possible to drown an oldman in a ditch and then ‘head on home to go in and out of doors anddrive cars and sing sometimes’ (p.), the last a reference to his brother.His final observation in this speech, however, though relating directly tothis ironic contrast, leads the play in another direction, Vietnam becom-ing an image for a more profound alienation For if the suffering ofothers never really cuts us to the quick, if we can pass on, then ‘We arehoboes! We make signs in the dark You know yours I understand myown We share coffee’ (p ).

This is a key speech in a play that takes the Vietnam experience as aspring-board, a play about egotism, about the space between people,about loss, about the gap between our actions and the responsibility that

we are prepared to accept for those actions, about the desire for a ent and reassuring world, about the authority of language, the ambiva-lence of motives, the fragility of memory, the tenuousness ofrelationships, the power of myth, the fear of the new, the urgency withwhich we deny what disturbs us When Harriet is faced with the fact ofDavid’s Vietnamese lover, she vomits; Ozzie, described as ‘like a man indeep water looking for something to keep him afloat’ (p ), seizes apack of cigarettes and speaks in the language of the commercials whichhave helped to define his notion of reality (‘The filter’s granulated It’s

coher-an off-product of corn husks I light up – I feel I’m on a ship at sea’ (pp

–) He retreats from the painful business of relationships into aworld of images, signs with no signifiers

A similar occlusion of meaning is apparent when David has a filmprojected for the family, a film that in fact shows nothing at all Their sit-uation, thus gathered together, sharing nothing and understandingnothing of one another, is offered as an image of their lives As Davidremarks, he is ‘a blind man in a room in a house in the dark, raisingnothing in a gesture of no meaning toward two voices who are not

speaking of a certain incredible connection!’ (p.) Connection

is the key It is the principal absence in a play in which absence (theabsence of Zung, the Vietnamese girl, of love, concern, hope) is tangible.For Ozzie, that absence extends to himself: ‘There’s no evidence in theworld of me, no sign or trace, as if everything I’ve ever done were nomore than smoke My life has closed over me like water’ (p.) He is

‘lonely’, void, unable to reach out, unconvinced that to do so will givehim what he has lost

Not only is there no connection between the members of the family,there is no connection between individuals and their own self-image,

their own remembered youth Thus we discover that there was a timewhen Ozzie’s life had been suffused with poetry, when, still young, hewas confident about his own future and not yet defined by social role (‘Iwas nobody’s goddamn father and nobody’s goddamn husband! I wasmyself !’ (p.)) Those days have gone This is now a world which lacksany connective tissue Vietnam is simply a reminder of what appears amore fundamental truth.

Rabe has said of the play that ‘I think it is about the war, I think it isn’tabout the war It’s certainly about coming home from the war, and it cer-tainly makes a political statement about materialistic oblivion in relation

to carnage’ (Schroeder, ed., Vietnam, p.) To his mind, however, it wasalso about complicity, the complicity of a society that closes its eyes towhat is done in its name, and the complicity of the audience who he cal-culates will find David as ‘unreasonable’ as do his family and henceendorse the logic that leads to his death Beyond that, he acknowledges

of himself that, ‘I live my life, and I haven’t taken the time to understand

or do anything about those things that I should’ (Schroeder, ed., Vietnam,

p ) If David’s invitation to join him in his anarchic vision of theworld is a demand that can only be resisted, then the amnesia desper-ately chosen by those wishing to shore up their version of the real is also

a moral, social and psychological cul-de-sac

Sticks and Bones was, for the most part, critically well reviewed and was

transferred to Broadway, where it had a respectable run ( mances) but lost , dollars a performance, while winning a Tony

perfor-Award Together with The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, ho wever, it

served to place David Rabe at the centre of attention It was also the

recipient of a Tony Award to add to those awards earned by The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel.

His next play, however, and the third part of the trilogy, The Orphan

(), was not a success A complex play, which incorporated the Greektragedy of Orestes, Electra and Iphigenia, the Charles Manson killingsand My Lai, it prompted preview audiences to walk out As Stuart W.Little has pointed out, astonishingly Joe Papp chose to enclose an expla-nation of the play in the opening-night programme:

David Rabe’s utilization of primitive Greek myth interwoven with

contempo-rary bloodletting does call upon the audience’s familiarity with the Oresteia in all

its versions, the Manson affair, drug culture, and My Lai – not to mention The

Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones, the remaining two-thirds of

the Rabe trilogy But the knowledge, I venture to say, is not an essential

require-ment for responding to the work (Enter Joseph Papp, pp.–)