Word: rabe
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STREAMERS. Playwright David Rabe casts a compassionate eye on the combat zone of the psyche in this powerful finale to his Viet Nam trilogy...
...DAVID RABE...
...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...
Director Mike Nichols' work is clean, powerful and electric, and he has elicited from 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...
This composite figure pervades Rabe's plays. In classic terms his protagonists are all undergoing initiation rites. But the lack of catharsis in his dramas means that after the initiation, no induction into full manhood occurs...