Word: hummell
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There was no way to escape the memory of Ronny in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel not just because of the similarity between him and Pavlo but because this play is a head-on collision with the past ten years. Out of a haze, 1966, which was AM radio in a warm spring, walks up dressed in army fatigues and presses its bayonet against your belly...
Author David Rabe has written a play on the war in Vietnam that defies a million slogans to become a contemporary masterpiece. Pavlo Hummel is an innocuous little guy from 231 East 45th Street, Manhattan, who with the beginning of his basic training is on the way to becoming "the fattest rat in the finest cheese." Lost in the big world, Pavlo has adopted army standards and has committed himself to a pathetic struggle to meet them. Fresh from his overwhelming success as the son in the Godfather, Al Pacino gives a performance that can have no equal...
GUSTAVE JOHNSON is Ardell, the cool uniformed black who is Hummel's mentor and friend, a shadowy figure counselling him through the play's series of flashbacks and burying him at their end. He and Walter Lott the flamboyant drill Sergeant, Barry Saider the bully and Richard Lynch the maimed hospital patient, give performances that stand out in the excellent supporting cast. Director David Wheeler stages the play without a pretention of proscenium--as if it were in his living room--and after 60 productions with the Theatre Company it might as well be. Set designer John Thornton has divided...
...bloody war in Viet Nam actively festers in the imagination of one of the more promising young U.S. playwrights, David Rabe. In his drama of last season, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, the taste of blood and the apprehension of imminent death gave the evening an elastic tension. His offering last week, Sticks and Bones, presented at Joseph Papp's Public Theater (TIME, Nov. 15), might be a sequel to Pavlo Hummel. The hero has returned from Viet Nam not dead but blind, a walking corpse in some perpetual nighttime of the soul. There is blood again...
...flawed American plays than outstanding foreign plays," he says. Charles Gordone became the first black playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize with his 1969 Public Theater production of No Place to Be Somebody. David Rabe won an Obie for last season's The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel...