Word: rabe
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...probably wasn't entirely without a sense of theater that the Provisional Revolutionary Government entered Ho Chi Minh city within hours of May Day, but the war in Vietnam ended with less drama than we might have expected. What of the drama the war produced in the U.S.? David Rabe's Sticks and Bones has usually been considered the best of it, with other works like Medal of Honor Rag being placed by critics "in the tradition of Sticks and Bones." The play is about the psychic warping of a blind Vietnam veteran and the havoc he creates back home...
...DAVID RABE...
...soap opera it could be retitled "Chrissy Bumps into Life." Chrissy (Madeline Kahn) is a dumb, pitiable, wistful lump of humanity. She encounters people who, if they were objects, would be found rusting away in the town dump. It is the fashionable conviction of many young playwrights, including David Rabe, that the planet is currently populated by lesbians, homosexuals, sadistic drunks, incestuous fathers, maternal vultures and men with the ingrained instincts of rapists...
...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...
...Greeks, the Oresteia was an exemplary tale of moral downfall designed to evoke pity and terror. Rabe's tone is pejorative, like that of a prosecuting attorney who is pressing play goers to confess that all men are bloody-minded beasts. There is no court of appeal in The Orphan. God is dead, absolute power has produced absolute corruption and society is a cracked veneer of hypocrisy...