Word: rabe
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...DAVID RABE...
...curtain, a hand lobs a lump of steel. Thump and roll. "Grenade!" Soldier scoops it up, hesitates in stupid disbelief. FLASH! BLAM! So begins-and 140 minutes later, in an almost exact replay, so ends-The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. Between these two unanswerable exclamation points, Playwright David Rabe strings the lifeline of the soldier, Pavlo; then on that cord he attempts to hang what he sees as the rags of national honor, bloodied by the Viet...
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...
What is most remarkable about the play is how effortlessly Rabe goes beyond the war and what is obvious to proceed with the personal story of Pavlo Hummel. It baffles classification and makes world war two dramas like Arthur Laurent's Home of the Brave look like a Yank comic strip. For Hummel the army world is his only hope for salvation, the only remedy for his fatherlessness. And in a way he makes it his salvation. Home on a furlough, his pink-suited, mod half-brother treats him with the mild contempt he always has until Hummel explodes. "Look...
...might lack some of the intensity of a more limited drama. But each scene is so interesting and the whole texture of the play is so rich with its cadence counts, lap-hopping whores and old rock songs that it's impossible to say what should be deleted. Rabe's too sweet a talker. And anyone who can make 1966 eerie and fascinating shouldn't be tampered with...