Word: rabe
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
...past when he wore no straitjacket: "I was nobody's goddam father. I was nobody's goddam husband, and I could run-nobody could run the way I could run-run for the sun." That is pain distilled into compassion, a special gift of David Rabe's, Harriet (Elizabeth Wilson) is one of those mothers who likes to think that she only "lives for others"-as selflessly as a vampire bat. David's younger brother Rick (Cliff DeYoung) pops in and out of the house with a vacuous...
While the territory he traverses is not new, Rabe strides across it with such intensity that the playgoer is raptly involved. What Sticks and Bones lacks is size and scope. Rabe is good enough so that he ought to ponder what makes a dramatist an enduring force rather than simply a Geiger counter of his times. The Greeks and the Elizabethans, who deemed men valiant heroes as great as their doom, produced awesome drama. It is the current American fashion to see men as brain-bleached automatons, and our drama has shrunk to precisely those mean, narrow and dispiriting dimensions...
...American playwrights, whom he regards as a vital natural resource. "I'd rather do 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...