Word: rabe
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...dispensing sage advice to the wife and kids, sons perpetually chirping about baseball and fudge--these are the characters that inhabit the surrealistic landscape of television situation comedy. From this same world--embodying everything most apple-pie-like in the American consciousness--comes the family in David Rabe's Sticks and Bones, which distorts these stereotypes without ever quite leaving them behind. Rabe is out to spare us nothing. Not only do characters in this particular situation comedy have to go the the bathroom; worse, they come out with lines like "I want to drink from the toilet and wash...
Sticks and Bones is, first of all, the story of a blind and emotionally--mutilated Vietnam veteran returning home to a family that is supremely unprepared to receive him. But Rabe is talking not so much about the Vietnam War as about the cultural distortions that made America's involvement in the war seem right. His subjects are men whose lives leave no trace and women whose motto is. "We don't matter, only the kids"--generations of Americans negating themselves so that their posterity can do the same. Rabe is anything but subtle; nevertheless, his play is still powerful...
...CAST DOES a more than competent job of keeping Rabe's sometime disjointed work llowing smoothly through moments of both absurdist comedy and high dramatic tension. Some of the credit belongs to director Warren Browner, who had chosen to de-emphasize the play's surrealism and treat it more as a parody of those cheerfully resilient American types, forced for once to confront and destroy the product of their own invested values...
...Duncan's disembodied portrayal of the black sergeant who brings the Vietnam veteran. David home; speaking in harsh clipped tones, more like a robot than a man, the sergeant seems to belong to a different play. Another, more annoying problem is the cast's general difficulty in dealing with Rabe's overtly symbolic passages. Because of Browner's naturalistic handling of the play it's starting at times to hear characters suddenly hurting into literary effusion or even conscientiously using the formal "do not" in place of the colloquial contraction...
...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...