Contemporary American Playwrights - David Rabe

 
David Rabe
‘There are times,’ wrote Peter Brook, ‘when I am nauseated by the
theatre, when its artificiality appals me, although at the very same
moment I recognize that its formality is its strength.’ He was speaking in
the context of a play inspired by a distant war in which his own country
allegedly 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 theatre
company, but in England, and by a state-subsidised theatre whose repu-
tation was built on productions of Elizabethan drama, though, under
Brook, 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.
2
But at that stage the American theatre was
only just beginning to respond to the developing war, with the Bread and
Puppet 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 is
almost always harmless and beneficent; it does not seek to be anything

else but an illusion. Save in the case of a few people who are, one might

1
Peter Brook, The Shifting Point: Forty Years of Theatrical Exploration – (London, ), p. .
2
R. G. Davis, ‘Guerrilla Theatre’, Tulane Drama Review, , (Summer ), p. .
say, obsessed by art, it never dares to make any attacks on the realm of
reality’ (‘Guerrilla Theatre’, p. ). He accuses the American theatre in
particular of lacking such an obsession, before outlining plans which
sound remarkably like a defence of the Mime Troupe’s own mode of
operations. Within two years he was personally inviting audiences to
take 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 powerfully
concern actors and audiences at the actual moment when they meet. For
common sense is outraged by the supposition that old wars in old words are
more 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 con-
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 has
yet made a better man’, indeed that ‘the more barbaric the people the
more they appear to appreciate the arts’ (p. ). These last remarks are
taken from what he chose to call his ‘Manifesto for the Sixties’, and are
clearly not as absolutist as they seem, since he then set himself to create
a series of productions which sought, as he explained, to ‘make us lose
our balance’, to ‘help us see better’ (p. ). Nor was he offering a critique

of Shakespeare, for example, but of what the theatre had chosen to
make of Shakespeare. As he observed, ‘the dead man moves, we stay still
. . . It is not the Shakespearean method that interests us. It is the
Shakespearean 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 group
of twenty-five actors, working with a number of writers, spent several
months exploring the Vietnamese situation. The play itself emerged
from a fifteen-week rehearsal period. Brook had no interest in a Theatre
of Fact, believing documentaries to be the business of other media (in
that 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 in
the United States. He wished to confront the audience with the gap
between the horrors of Vietnam and ordinary life, an objective which
David Rabe 
culminated, at the end of the production, when ‘all pretences of play-
acting ceased and actor and audience together paused, at a moment
when they and Vietnam were looking one another in the face’ (Brook,
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 an
opportunity, 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 that
the actors could lay aside all pretence of play-acting. Indeed, in that pro-
tracted period of silence (ten or fifteen minutes) the audience was itself
turned into so many actors, performing for the benefit of those who sur-
rounded them and even for themselves. What is interesting is Brook’s
attempt to find some way in which subject matter as powerful as he

wished to present could be communicated. Elsewhere in the piece a
butterfly was supposedly set alight, inspiring a familiar British response,
since for the British animals are liable to come somewhere above man in
the chain of being. And though this was doubtless part of Brook’s cal-
culation, as audiences were asked to confront the discrepancy between
their immediate alarm for the insect (in fact made of paper) and their
more distant concern for those dying, or immolating themselves in
Vietnam (in the film version a monk in Vietnam and a Quaker in
Washington are seen burning themselves to death), even for those less
naive the gesture was potentially distracting as technical questions
momentarily displaced moral ones. Such moments, though, were
designed 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 Mother
Courage drawing her cart or two tramps under a tree.
The play’s ambiguous title was designed to bring home to British
audiences their own responsibility for events supposedly that of others.
Even after stage and film versions, however, Brook could not convince
himself 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 great
disservice in pitching the question so falsely. Will this act of protest stop the
killing? 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.)
 Contemporary American playwrights
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 easily

recuperated. But there is a more profound problem having to do with
the 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, after
all, has its own logic and procedures, its own imperatives, casuistries and
honesties. And in common with the other arts it has the greatest
difficulty in approaching extreme situations, though Brook himself
called precisely for a theatre of extremes. Vietnam posed such a problem
to the dramatist but then so, too, did the Holocaust. Where is the com-
manding play about the Second World War?
It is not hard to see the attraction of the Theatre of Fact. It has the
virtue if not of unmediated fact, since the writer becomes an editor, then
at least of apparently reducing aesthetic contamination. But it surren-
ders other possibilities which depend precisely on distorting the literal,
on plunging down into fractured psyches. Like Peter Weiss’s play it is
drawn to the epic, to historicity, chronicity. Even allowing for the pow-
erful authenticity that is a product of testimony, however, it necessarily
abjures visions, dreams, nightmares, the inexpressible trauma. It denies
itself the communicative power of fantasy, of a theatre in which lan-
guage may work against action, character be problematic, truth be a
product not of verifiable event but wilful distortion. This was a sacrifice
that a playwright who grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, was not prepared to
make, a man who had traded an ambition to be a professional football
player 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 was
drafted, unless you were fairly politically astute, there was no war. It
didn’t exist. It was about to exist in a big way, but it didn’t.’
3
He was
drafted in  and served in . He tried to keep a journal but failed,
David Rabe 
3
Eric Schroeder, ed., Vietnam: We’ve All Been There (Westport, CT, ), p. .
too aware of the gap between available language and the experience he
wanted to describe: ‘I was acutely aware, and in a way that makes writing
impossible, of the existence of language as mere symbol.’
4
Unable 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. The
events 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 disturbing
events into language was to do violence to both: ‘not only to see the dead
and crippled, the bodies, beggars, lepers, but to replay in your skull their
desperation and the implications of their pain’. This ‘seemed a lunatic
journey’ (p. xvii). Even his letters, he has confessed, grew more prosaic
and 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 budding
writer, in  one of his plays, Bridges, receiving a workshop production.
He was drafted at the age of twenty-five, having flirted with the idea of
becoming a conscientious objector. At the time, though, he regarded the
war as a just cause. Once there, he responded ambiguously. In his inval-
uable study of Rabe’s stage history,
6
Philip 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 he
explained, ‘’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 human
limbs and piles of green uniforms. The impact was terrific on anyone
who 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, finding
business going on as usual. For a while I couldn’t talk to anyone who
hadn’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.
 Contemporary American playwrights
4
David Rabe, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones (New York, ), p. xvi.
5
David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York, ), p. .
6

Philip 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 he
thought 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 glitter
crammed into a form as rigid as any machine geared to reproduce the
shape 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 meta-
phor that ultimately resolved his problem.
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 on
trial for murder in that city, Yale University was temporarily closed and
a so-called Revolutionary Congress was called. The year before had
been marked by riots, the Manson killings in California and news of the
My Lai massacre. Rabe felt himself ambivalently placed, unable to sym-
pathise with the war but equally repelled by those who protested it
without knowing of its reality. In an article on draft resisters, quoted by
Kolin, he described them as having ‘the rage of duped and frustrated
love ...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 my
dream, where I matter, I have conversations with cats, trees, stones, other
people, and we agree upon things. I ask atoms what they are. I tell them that
knowing 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 gun
barrel. 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 a
review 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 his
Vietnam 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
David Rabe 
7
Barnett 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 in
which the reality of the war disappeared in the issue of the war rather
than 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 to
itself, to give the world a sermon that would bring it back to its truest self, for I
thought then (and I did indeed believe it) that the history and exact nature of
both mankind and the world were known, universal, eternal. I no longer write
from 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 be

known 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 had
proposed. His was not guerilla theatre, except in so far as he waged war
on ignorance and denial. The plays he wrote were attempts to under-
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 its
reality was part of his daily life.
The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel,effectively the first of not a trilogy
but 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 regional
and 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 in
Vietnam. It is not realistic, though the documentary impulse was a pow-
erful presence in the first act which went into rehearsal at Joe Papp’s
Public Theatre, not least because Rabe still felt the pressure to report
that had led him to attempt a journal back in Vietnam. At first Papp
urged 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 about
people. Therefore I wanted it done in the theatrical form in which dra-
matic characters had the best chance of appearing as simply people’
 Contemporary American playwrights
(Basic Training, pp. xiv–xv). In the course of rehearsals, however, he came
to accept the logic of Papp’s suggestions, the impressionism of the
second 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 drill

sergeant’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 of
whose elements are to have ‘some military tone to them, some echo of
basic training’ (p. ), private and public dramas are enacted. The army
is, in effect, teaching Pavlo and the other recruits to act. He is trained in
voice, language, movement. He is costumed and given a part to play in
a drama not of his own devising. The theatricality that Rabe had ini-
tially resisted becomes a central mechanism.
Though the play was carefully constructed, and then reconstructed in
rehearsal, it gives the impression of feelings and perceptions even now
not fully under control. Discipline and anarchy do battle. Violence is
acted out but its meaning remains in some sense opaque to its central
character, Pavlo. He is no less bemused by the world in which he moves
than 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 to
make sense of such alien experiences. He is like Saul Bellow’s dangling
man, welcoming regimentation as a relief from alienation. He looks for
meaning in the role he is given, but finds none as the world disintegrates
around him. A fellow soldier is dismantled, like Nathanael West’s
Lemuel Pitkin, losing limbs and his will to live. Pavlo himself looks for a
coherence in his life that never comes. He exists in a space that can be
invaded at any moment by elements over which he has no control. Never
marching to a different drummer, he is an agent and not a principal. He
fails to forge relationships with others which go beyond immediate and
self-limiting physical needs. He has no private system of morality to
counterpose 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 bru-
talities and injustices of the world, a Woyzeck, wandering through an
alien world, though his ignorance of Vietnam was shared by Rabe at the
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?
David Rabe 
Where? What’s he talking about?’’ ’ (Schroeder, ed., Vietnam,p.). But
Pavlo’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 other
words, 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 has
failed to find elsewhere, a role that has evaded him, a myth he can
inhabit. But it also represents the chance of extinction for which his
mother believes him to be searching.
Rabe himself has said that, ‘if the character of Pavlo Hummel does
not have a certain eagerness and wide-eyed spontaneity, along with a
true, real and complete inability to grasp the implications of what he
does, the play will not work as it can. Pavlo is in fact lost. He has, for a
long 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 that
Vietnam 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 seems
preferable to the anarchy which otherwise seems to prevail. Certainly
here, and in his later plays, loss seems a central theme, as if something
had disappeared from America long before the Vietnam war: some

cohesiveness, some sense of meaning beyond self-gratification.
Pavlo Hummel is an extreme case but he shares with his culture an
attraction for fantasy and a consoling sense of community, less real than
an expression of need. His own arrogant chauvinism has its reflection in
the wider society, with its misogyny and its racism. Seen thus, Vietnam
merely acts as a special case, a metaphor for a deeper sense of aliena-
tion and estrangement. At the same time, war raises the stakes. Under
its 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’s
death. He is killed, it later transpires, by a fellow soldier in a Vietnamese
brothel. 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’, as
well 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
 Contemporary American playwrights
product of myth, an angel of death summoned into existence by Pavlo’s
need. 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 that
American bombers had killed their own friends. Pavlo shoots a
Vietnamese farmer and is himself knifed. He learns certain truths: ‘we
tear. We rip apart . . . we tear’ (Basic Training, p. ). As Ardell insists, ‘the
knowledge comin’, baby. I’m talkin’ about what your kidney know, not
your fuckin’ fool’s head . . . We melt; we tear and rip apart’ (p. ). Pavlo
learns his own vulnerability and that of others but still, and in contra-
diction, clings to the idea of his own final invulnerability, to the belief

that killing can neutralise killing. He never learns the truth that Ardell
offers: ‘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 physical
efficiency, even his mental efficiency increases, but insight never comes
. . . he will learn only that he is lost, not how, why, or even where. His
talent 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 indictment
beyond that which it directs at those who choose to be blind to events
and 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 so
much 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 so
damn depressed about it all. And Joanna, she read his name in the paper, she
let out this little gasp and say to her husband across the table, ‘Jesus, Jimmy, I
used to go with that boy. Oh, damn that war, why can’t we have peace? I think
I’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? . . . And
what 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
David Rabe 
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 Vietnam
and even more of those who stayed behind.
The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel is about the difficulty of understand-
ing the world, of finding a language that can explain it, of knowing how
other people’s lives connect with our own, of relating events to the
meaning of those events, of acknowledging our power to act and our
responsibility for so acting. It is a play about Vietnam but, as Hurlyburly
would show, estrangement, alienation and a callous disregard for the
other were not a product of a distant war. Indeed, looking back from the
late 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 David
Mamet 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 Tet
offensive in Vietnam, the year, in other words, that Americans became
aware that the war could be lost, as Viet Cong troups invaded the
embassy compound in Saigon. It was the year before Lieutenant Calley
and his company undermined the idealistic rhetoric applied to the war
by slaughtering men, women and children at My Lai, though Rabe was
later anxious to insist that the play, in origin, had preceded these events.
But though Rabe’s play was not a protest work contemporary audiences
would unavoidably have experienced it through their awareness of those
unfolding 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 .It
transferred to Broadway in March of the following year. This is a play

that also comes, in part, out of Rabe’s own bafflement at the American
response to Vietnam. Though his tour was relatively uneventful, on his
return, after a brief period, he began to be disturbed by the response of
those around him: ‘it was like going to Mars. Because what you walked
into was this unbelievable incomprehension and indifference that you
just 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.
 Contemporary American playwrights
Blinded in the war, he comes back to a family that is conventional to the
point of parody. Indeed, the characters are based on figures from a
popular radio and television comedy which ran for twenty years.
Desperate to sustain their own version of normality, they try to ignore
his 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 is
set seems to ‘belong in the gloss of an advertisement’. It is, according to
the stage directions, the ‘family home’ (Basic Training,p.), but both
those terms prove problematic as an American family falls apart and
home 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 this
family prays together it manifestly does not stay together. It is blown
apart by the inconvenient presence of a family member who no longer
recognises his role, who intrudes ideas, values and anxieties at odds with
a bland existence, and whose language leads them into depths they
would 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 give
satisfaction, to conform to the model of behaviour they expect. He is, as
Rabe has indicated, ‘no longer lovable’, so they no longer love him. He
damages their self-image as a happy family, denies those aspects of
themselves 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 their
belief 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. In
fact, 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-headed
hedonist, the other anguished, with a touch of the poet. Here, too, as in
David Rabe 
Miller’s play, is a drama in which a version of the American dream is
exposed under the pressure of needs that cannot be fully acknowledged,
in the face of realities so at odds with familiar pieties. Indeed, Harriet is
given 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 so
thrilling to see them leaving together. I can’t get over the smell of shaving
lotion 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, in
Rabe’s play love is no more than a word. Harriet has no substance. She
builds 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 find
some material correlative for his need for personal meaning: ‘I keep
having 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 against
meaning. 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 made
explicit. Characters describe their feelings, often at length. Yet little of
this communicates. Indeed, part of the play’s effect comes from the dis-
junction between what is said and how the other characters respond. As
Rabe remarks in an Author’s Note, ‘David throws a yelling, screaming
tantrum over his feelings of isolation and Harriet confidently, cheerfully
offers Ezy Sleep sleeping pills in full faith that this will solve his problem.
The actors,’ he instructs, ‘ must not physically ignore things . . . The
point is not that they do not physically see or hear, but that they psycho-
logically ignore’ (p. ). Only by ignoring what they see, as David
reveals 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 of
slides are projected. The slides include pictures of Ozzie and Harriet at
the 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

 Contemporary American playwrights
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. The
woman then comments on another slide, identifying David as though he
were 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, the
next generation American family. The slide of David, in effect a flash
forward 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 a
reality in which he does not wish to involve himself) and a television set
flickers 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 inter-
preted by one of the children as ‘somebody sick’. It takes the length of
the play to understand what that ‘sickness’ consists of.
At the beginning of the play Harriet and Ozzie exchange sentimen-
tal memories of the son who is now to return to them, memories,
though, tainted with menace (he had locked himself in an icebox and
fallen 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
is to become defensive about his own failure to serve in the military, and
to boast about his own exploits, achievements no more significant than
outrunning 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 all
present in the first minutes.
Rabe has denied any influence from Pinter while, curiously, indicat-
ing that ‘I tried to graft certain things on because he was popular and his

techniques are very seductive’ (Savran, In Their Own Words,p.).
Failing to get his plays produced, Rabe had, pragmatically, studied the
techniques of those who did, and it is certainly very tempting to see more
than an echo of Pinter in this homecoming. A door opens and a man
enters, who by his very presence threatens an equanimity which is itself
illusory. Violence is, for the most part, immanent rather than enacted,
though David strikes out with his white stick, as in The Caretaker,for
example, a knife is wielded though not used. As in Pinter’s work, power
shifts between the characters who, on occasion, are permitted extended
speeches, 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 and
aggression as he delivers David like an express package. Indeed, his
David Rabe 