Word: pavlos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Playwright David Rabe's trilogy The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones and Streamers, explored military brutalizations in the Viet Nam era. This week in Manhattan Actor Michael Moriarty is opening in David Berry's play G.R. Point, an equally brutal work about men doing graves registration duty in Viet Nam. Its refrain: "The 'Nam hasn't got any heroes. Dead is dumb, and dead in the 'Nam is the dumbest...
...couch (and still keeps an appointment with an analyst every Wednesday). Then, following the inexorable law of any success story, her luck changed. The parts began coming in, and two years ago she met and began living with Playwright David Rabe, who has written The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones and Streamers. She and Rabe, 37, now share a big apartment on Manhattan's West Side, together with a mongrel puppy and, occasionally, Jason, Rabe's five-year-old son by a former marriage...
...outward form, David Rabe's trilogy of military plays, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, and now Streamers, appears to be about the brutalizing effect of army life and the scourge of Viet Nam on the U.S. conscience. In inner content, they are more like detonations of the individual psyche -a simple soul goes berserk...
...Dorian Harewood a shattering performance that is equally intense in its falsely gibing nonchalance and in its true sorrow. But what about Playwright Rabe and his obsession with the same terrain and subject? It is worth noting that none of his "war" plays take place in the combat zone. Pavlo Hummel probed the rigors of boot camp, Sticks and Bones exposed the unhealing scar tissue of a returned Viet Nam veteran, and now Streamers exhausts itself in an intermediate no man's land where fear barely dares to speak its name, or love its deviant desires...
...basis of this evidence it would be easy to kiss off the play as just another sample of faddist effluvia. But Rabe has more gravity and force than that, as he has shown in his Viet Nam plays, Sticks and Bones and The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. He has a wildly exhilarating, surrealistic humor that has not been exhibited in the U.S. theater since Edward Albee wrote The Sandbox, Zoo Story and An American Dream. He has a painful awareness of familial alienation, a kind of psychic wound that will not heal. His last play, a disaster, was significantly...