war. His enthusiasm for a career as an army “lifer” and his desire to excel in the community that is superficially symbolized by army ritual actually exclude him from his fellow draftees and from a realistic perspective on the war itself. As a foil to almost everyone else in the play, Pavlo is most clearly exemplified by his consistent naïveté and stupid fervor. For example, he persistently volunteers for menial duties and eagerly performs supplemental physical training. He takes solitary bayonet and port arms practice when he should be in formation and anxiously studies the conduct manual for the upcoming proficiency test.

In act 2, Pavlo enjoys the sexual experience that eluded him on his leave, despite his snappy dress uniform. The sergeant drills the men on one side of the stage as Pavlo makes four-beat love to Yen on the other. Reluctantly serving as a medic in a field hospital, Pavlo refuses to comprehend the vivid example of a soldier blown into a living stump. Only after he is actually wounded in combat does Pavlo recognize the vicious truth of the infantryman’s plight on the field. Whereas he formerly associated acts of violence in the barracks or on the battlefield with an affirmation of manhood, Pavlo simply wants to go home after he is wounded for the third time. Rewarded, instead, with a Purple Heart, he retreats to the whorehouse for a dalliance with Yen and the assignation with the grenade that finally kills him.

From start to finish, Pavlo Hummel is doomed—as trainee, medic, or combat infantryman. Army ritual overtly offers community, song, and some humor as both a mask and an excuse for the violence that awaits Pavlo. Life for the enlisted man in Vietnam, however, actually means every man for himself. The interweaving of past and present, the use of simultaneous action, and the play’s Surrealist and absurdist elements demonstrate Pavlo’s self-centered confusion and his failure to develop. In some respects, he is so one-dimensional that it is difficult to maintain sympathy for him.

Sticks and Bones

Like The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones begins with the ending, the ritualistic suicide of the protagonist David, a blinded Vietnam veteran. Shockingly, his father, mother, and younger brother encourage and assist him in this act. As Pavlo’s army “family” rebuffs him, so do Ozzie, Harriet, and Ricky reject David. Unlike Pavlo, however, David denies his family, too; they mutually repel one another. In his naming of the characters, Rabe parodies the popular situation comedy The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet: This middle-class American family is the antithesis of the television Nelsons.

The ritual matter of Sticks and Bones arises from what Rabe considers the symbols of modern American culture: racism and television. Both destroy communication and, thus, indicate the mutual alienation of David and his family. Television offers a desirable fantasy life redolent of money and materialism. Related to sexual fear and insecurity, racism answers the need to feel superior to some group. From the instant when David is virtually delivered home, he and his family are strangers to one another. Ozzie even considers checking his son’s dental records to verify his identity.

Although he is physically blind, David’s moral vision has been expanded by his experiences in Vietnam and also by his sense of guilt over the Vietnamese girl, Zung, whom he loved but, typically, deserted. A symbol of continuity between his past and present, the wraithlike Zung appears intermittently throughout the play and, until the climax, is “seen” by David only. She embodies the immediate motivation for the mission he assumes in his parents’ home, as their moral blindness is exemplified by virulent racial and sexual prejudice. Their contempt for the Vietnamese recalls that of the soldiers in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel in its perverted preoccupation with sex. Neither Ozzie nor Harriet can tolerate the notion that David might have engendered children with yellow faces and, worse, that he might have brought them home. Both in the field and at home, Rabe charges, the Vietnamese are despised by the Americans, who profess to help them.

David’s abrasive presence and his withering accusations cause his parents’ superficial veneer of middle-class respectability to blister and peel away. Ozzie is deeply troubled that his combat experience has been confined to his safe childhood, when he regularly beat up “Ole Fat Kramer.” During World War II, his army service consisted of truck maintenance. Operating as a catalytic agent, then, David releases his father’s suppressed capacity for violence. Zung becomes visible to Ozzie, who, refusing to “see” her, nevertheless strangles her. Ricky suggests that David should cut his wrists, and Harriet provides pans and towels so that the blood will not stain the carpet. With this ritualistic self-sacrifice, David is exorcised from the mainstream of the middle-class consciousness and can pose no further challenge to the self-deluded but triumphant American way of life.

In this grotesque family portrait, Rabe demonstrates that domestic violence is as terrible as the military violence in Vietnam. Through language and action, he indicates the irreconcilable division within the family and charges that racism was a basic cause of the war in Vietnam. The polarization of the family, concurrently, is a source of the play’s most disabling flaw. The dramatist would have his audience simplistically concede that a blinded Vietnam veteran, by definition, possesses greater moral stature than his family, that he is entitled, because of his combat experiences, to instruct them in moral concerns. David’s sufferings, however, have not enhanced his capacity for understanding and compassion, the requisites for the moral stature he assumes, but have only refined his ability to hate. Like Ozzie, Harriet, and Rick, David remains a cipher despite the truth of much of his indictment of American life.

Additionally, the names of the characters finally detract from Rabe’s message as well because their names isolate them from the audience. The television Nelson clan, in all its saccharine perfection, is so one-dimensional a target that the playwright’s generalizations about middle-class America become increasingly difficult to accept. Nevertheless, taken in conjunction with The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones presents a disturbing portrayal of the divisive features of American military and domestic experience in the late 1960’s.

The Orphan

The Orphan is Rabe’s most intellectually complex play, but it is marred by thematic diffuseness. Instead of using modern war as the background, the playwright employs Aeschylus’s Oresteia, with its informing theme of violence within the family, as a framework for his consideration of the related phenomena of Vietnam and My Lai, governmental apathy, commercial obsession, and the Manson murders. As in Sticks and Bones, the source of all corruption resides in the family. Touchstones of modern American culture are sex, drugs, business, and killing. The rigid progression of cause to effect enslaves men, and past becomes present as men and women seem literally born to kill.

Murder is so common that it achieves the status of ritual, its rites observable in governmental policy statements, the entrails of birds, current scientific explanations, and hallucinatory drug rampages—all the same and all unavoidable. As a part of this ritual, language itself becomes automatic and thus debased: It helps to isolate people from one another by preserving the gaping distinctions between them. As such, it, too, is a blunt instrument of destruction.

Act 1 concerns the sacrifice of Iphegenia over the impassioned opposition of Clytemnestra 1 and the resultant murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra 2 and Aegisthus; act 2 entails Orestes’ revenge on his mother and her lover. From the tub in which Agamemnon is slaughtered, Orestes is born in act 2, blood-soaked and wrapped in the placenta-like net in which his father died: Life’s violent course is ordained from the moment of birth. In this same tub, the bound Clytemnestras—their simultaneous presence indicative of the identity between past and present—will be killed by Orestes. The womb, then, greatly resembles a grave.

Orestes’ revenge against Aegisthus reiterates both the Manson murders and the My Lai massacre; depravity and murder are nearly sanctified by their regularity in this world. Tainted by violence, Orestes is left literally suspended between the uncaring gods of heaven and the waiting Furies on earth, abandoned and deluded.

Although The Orphan makes provocative statements about modern American society, it founders on its diffusion of images and on its categorical statement that the United States is a murderous wasteland. If Orestes’ revenge is justifiable according to the myth, then the Manson murders and My Lai cannot be explained according to the same criterion. The audience withdraws because, to an even greater extent than in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones, the characters are totally manipulated in the service of the prevailing doctrine. Without alternative or ambiguity, they and The Orphan become morally artificial and intellectually confused. The spurting gore undercuts its own effect.

In the Boom Boom Room

With In the Boom Boom Room, the scene shifts to a deteriorating, neon-lit section of Philadelphia in the mid-1960’s. Once more, sex, violence, racism, self-deception, and inarticulateness are the interrelated themes. Although Vietnam is not a factor in this play, the characters live in an urban jungle in which the strong defeat and brutalize the weak. Chrissy, an aspiring go-go dancer who wants to become good enough to succeed in New York, is doomed in her struggle for individuality because she is a vulnerable woman in a man’s world. Ironically, the lives of the various men in Chrissy’s sphere are as rigidly circumscribed and hopeless as hers.

Chrissy is Rabe’s only female protagonist, but she has much in common with her male counterparts. Past and present intermingle to show that she is victimized by everyone she knows: her parents, her boyfriends, her lover, her homosexual neighbor, and the bisexual dance captain at the Boom Boom Room. Like Rabe’s other protagonists, she has little self-awareness.

With their associations of physical and mental imprisonment, spiritual isolation, and sexual exhibitionism, the go-go cages provide the continuous backdrop for the action. The controlling metaphor—and the ritual—grows out of the animalistic, solitary go-go dance itself. To be able to perform the Monkey and the Jerk fluidly and sensually will enable Chrissy to transfer to the elite realm of the go-go world, but the names of these dances symbolize the degradation that is her actual present and her future lot. Everyone wants something from her, most often sex, but no one loves her, starting with the mother who nearly aborted her.

A thief and a drunk like her father, Chrissy’s brutal, emotionally impotent lover, Al, destroys her professional hopes and, concomitantly, her ability to order her life. In an argument suffused with the sexism and racism also fundamental to The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones, Al beats Chrissy bloody. In the final scene of the play, she has come to New York, but as a masked topless dancer. She is completely anonymous, alone, and dehumanized.

In the Boom Boom Room is like The Orphan in its consistent despair about the human condition, but it lacks the intellectual gamesmanship that is the major interest of The Orphan. Rabe’s reflections on violence in modern America as seen through an Oresteian glass invite the audience—or more effectively, perhaps, the reader—to become sufficiently engaged by his philosophical comparisons between ancient and contemporary, mythical and mundane to treat them skeptically. The action of In the Boom Boom Room, however, adheres to a static, linear structure in which Chrissy does not develop as a personality but in which the quality of her life inexorably deteriorates. Although it is finally difficult to sympathize with Pavlo and David, one can discern a measure of conflict and vitality in their lives. Chrissy never has a chance.

Streamers

Rabe returns to the thematic background of the American experience in Vietnam in Streamers, his most persuasive play because it is his most straightforward. It concentrates exclusively on the interactions of four young army enlisted men, each of whom exemplifies a different facet of American society. Foregoing the flashbacks and the special effects of his earlier plays, Rabe here achieves sustained focus: The four characters form a desperate Family of Man in the barracks room.

Their clashing ideas about war, sex, and racism transform this barracks crucible into a battlefield on which violence is as certain, and as deadly, as the violence that awaits them in Vietnam. Their metaphorical parachutes have failed to open, and the matter of the play chronicles their fall to earth, streamers floating uselessly above them. Two older sergeants, Cokes and Rooney, one suffering from leukemia and the other an alcoholic, represent the general way that the four recruits are destined to go. As the exhausted members of the previous generation of cannon fodder, they introduce the song, set to the tune of Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer,” which provides the ritualistic foundation of the play: “Beautiful streamer,/ Open for me,/ The sky is above me,/ But no canopy.”

Like the parachutist and like Rabe’s other characters, Roger, Billy, Richie, and Carlyle have no control over their lives. For them, there is no escape from the barracks except through violence. If they survive the battlefield in the barracks, then the elephant traps in Vietnam loom before them. Isolated from the external world, they find no philosophical, racial, or sexual comradeship within the army either.

For example, Cokes and Rooney are embittered career men whose prolonged experiences of combat in World War II cause them simultaneously to envy and despise the two-year recruits. Blacks, represented by Roger and Carlyle, and whites, represented by Billy and Richie, live together warily, with ready recourse to a switchblade or an epithet. The homosexual Richie belongs to the army’s least visible, most defensive, minority. Rabe clearly establishes these categories within the army of the Vietnam era, but he succeeds in transcending them to an extent that he does not achieve in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones: The army in Streamers is a credible microcosm of American society at large.

Roger and Billy, black and white, exemplify the conventional middle-class stance. They ambitiously want to leave this holding company and get into the real army, yet it is understandably difficult for them to absorb the fierce prospect of Vietnam into their lives. Carlyle is a ghetto black terrified of the deadly fate that the army obviously, and casually, reserves for him, and Richie is a spoiled white in the process of adjusting to his homosexuality. They constitute a counterpoint to Roger and Billy, and their personal relationship inspires the crisis. Carlyle is the patented Rabean grenade who shatters the delicate equilibrium achieved by the other three; in this sense, his function resembles that of Pavlo and David in earlier Rabe plays. Alienated by his race, education, and social status, Carlyle loathes American society in general and the war in particular.

The two outcasts, Carlyle and Richie, deserted by their fathers and by conventional society, connect in a sexual relationship born as much from lonely despair as from physical craving. Roger can accept this situation, while Billy, on the other hand, is enraged by this desecration of his barracks “house.” His aggressive cries of outrage abruptly end as Carlyle repeatedly stabs him in the stomach in a fatal parody of the sexual act. The drunken Rooney literally stumbles into the fight’s aftermath and inadvertently becomes Carlyle’s next victim. As in many of Rabe’s plays, mindless violence prevails.

Richie and Roger, white and black, homosexual and heterosexual, have survived the barracks, but Vietnam, with its myriad opportunities for the unanticipated situations that produce streamers, awaits. If they survive Vietnam, there is always, as Sticks and Bones reveals, the home front.

There are no simple explanations for the characters’ motivations and actions in Streamers, and thus Rabe surpasses his previous work. He blends the themes of war, sex, racism, family, and resultant chaos without relying upon a schematic, predictable plot, exhibited at its least effective in In the Boom Boom Room.

Although Streamers is a sounder play, structurally, than Rabe’s prior dramas, it partakes of a full measure of their informing cynicism and despair. In all of his plays through Streamers, the dramatist establishes some expression of ritual as a reflection of disorder. People live in a world so irrational that there is virtually no order to subvert. This ethos contributes much to the spectacular, bloody stageworthiness of the plays and is, further, a direct function of their topicality. Their effectiveness depends crucially on an audience’s experience of American political, social, and cultural history in the second half of the 1960’s and the early 1970’s.

This topicality is the source of both the strength and the weakness of Rabe’s plays. For those who lived through the Vietnam era, the plays have a visceral, emotional impact that compensates, to some degree, for the stylization of the characters, their lack of alternatives, and their failure to develop. At the same time, however, like Rabe’s characters, the plays become victims of this topical concentration. With the exception of Streamers, they cannot transcend their particular time and place.

Hurlyburly

Rabe’s Hurlyburly appeared in New York in 1984 to general critical acclaim. This play marks both a continuation from and a break with his artistic past. The battlefield moves from Vietnam to the vicious jungle of Hollywood, but the prevailing violence and the fragmentation of the characters’ lives preclude the need for even a gesture toward the sort of ironic ritual that pervades his earlier plays.

The bungalow shared by Eddie and Mickey, two casting directors, provides a drug-inspired arena for the testing conflicts that are acted out between the male characters and, even more hideously, for their brutal expressions of fear and hatred for the various women who pliantly stumble into their lives. The world of Hurlyburly lacks moral focus of any sort. As Rabe stated in an interview in The New York Times that accompanied the play’s opening, the contemporary scene offers “philosophies that aren’t philosophies, answers that aren’t answers, one pharmaceutical solution after another.” Repellently dazzling as the play’s language is, it reiterates the playwright’s recurring theme: the willed failure to communicate, to care.

Those the River Keeps

Those the River Keeps focuses on the character Phil, a former convict who had also appeared as a struggling actor in Hurlyburly. In Those the River Keeps, Phil is confronted by an acquaintance from his criminal past who attempts to lure him back to a life of crime. Rabe once described the play as an “invitation/seduction” and remarked cryptically, “It’s literal in one way, and in another way it’s not.”

The title, according to Rabe, refers to forces from one’s past that are strong enough to keep pulling, no matter how one tries to pull away. Although the theme—that human attempts to move forward are ultimately doomed—is rather bleak, the play is darkly humorous, as characters express their frustration with life by wittily insulting each other.

A Question of Mercy

A Question of Mercy marked Rabe’s triumphant return to critical and popular acclaim after more than a decade of lukewarm reception. Unlike many of Rabe’s most significant plays, A Question of Mercy is informed less by the perils of a particular location (Vietnam or California) than by the struggles within one human heart. This difference is due in part to the fact that Rabe wrote the play as an adaptation of a nonfiction article by another writer, the physician Richard Selzer. However, the play is unmistakably Rabe’s, sharing with the earlier work a theme of the hopelessness of human endeavor, and a focus on contemporary concerns, in this case the issues of AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) and assisted suicide.

When Anthony, the young man at the center of the play, realizes he is dying of AIDS, he turns to his lover Thomas for help in ending his life painlessly. Together Thomas and Anthony turn to a retired doctor, Robert Chapman, to assist Anthony in committing suicide. As the group works through a plan to end Anthony’s life, their good intentions go wrong, and the plan and the bonds begin to unravel. The play follows the conflicts of the three main characters: Thomas, torn between his desire to help Anthony and his fear of legal trouble; the doctor, torn between his longing for meaningful contact with his patients and the realization that what Anthony needs from him is not a cure, but help dying; and Anthony himself, who is unconvincing in his declarations that he is ready to die.

In the end, the question of the merits of assisted suicide is unresolved; this is not a diatribe. Rabe is more interested in the characters’ struggles than in what ultimately happens to Anthony, who swings back and forth from dying to living to dying again in the last act. The focus in the end is on the survivors who, like Rabe’s other significant characters, are left isolated and unfulfilled.

The Dog Problem

Like Those the River Keeps, The Dog Problem draws on jokes about organized crime on the East Coast, but in The Dog Problem the gangsters are merely clowns. This parody of gangster stories revolves around a couple, Ray and Teresa, who share a sexual encounter with their dog Ed. When Teresa’s brother learns of the affair, he contacts a friend in the mob to avenge the family honor. The critics dealt harshly with the play, finding the jokes weak and the violence needlessly cruel.