Word: rabe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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HURLYBURLY by David Rabe...
...four live in Los Angeles and work on the fringe of show business. But David Rabe's Hurlyburly, which opened at the Promenade Theater off-Broadway last week, is a great deal more than just another satire of the Southern California lifestyle. Rabe's characters would essentially be what they are no matter where they lived or worked. As he sees it, there is a limbo of the lost through which American males of a certain age and status almost inevitably must pass these days. Divorced, not loving their abandoned children as much as they loathe their former...
...anguish of that search lies the profundity of Rabe's work. The playwright is functioning here as far more than a realist with an unsurpassed ear for contemporary speech. What he is saying, finally, is that words have begun to fail. The vocabulary in which his people speak, a jargon derived from televised reductions of reality and popularized psychology, leaves them without the tools they need to know their own minds, let alone the complexities of their shared existence. The bitterest of the many laughs Rabe provides derives from his recognition that the relentless articulateness of his people...
...language, he is obliged to define his characters through the rhythms of their speech, and he rises superbly to that most difficult of playwright's challenges. In testing himself, he is testing audiences as well. Usually plays about language call flashy attention to what they are doing. Rabe requires us to understand that when he is examining clichés he is not endorsing them. As with language, so with morality. The sympathy he feels for his mystified characters is not to be understood as approval...
Seven years later, through Director Robert Altman's camera eye, we can see that Streamers is only incidentally about Viet Nam. Men do not need a war to touch their heart of darkness, Rabe seems to suggest; the threat of human intimacy is provocation enough. Are they men like Billy (Matthew Modine), a fresh-faced lad with a college education? Or Richie (Mitchell Lichtenstein), an upper-class homosexual with a taste for taunt? Or Roger (David Alan Grier), a sweet-natured black who deflects each insult with a shrug? Or Carlyle (Michael Wright), the slum-bred black spoiling...