[In the following essay, Radavich argues that what separates Hurlyburly from other works that explore male homosocial relationships is Rabe's use of comedy and satire.]

Dramatic narratives of decadent, confused patriarchy under siege have dominated American theatre of the 1970s and '80s. David Mamet's stage works document the struggle of men to maintain close ties against a backdrop of mutual competitiveness, fear of and hostility toward women, and distrust of intimacy longed for but incapable of being acknowledged. Sam Shepard and David Rabe have mined the same area, with concentrated focus on the shifting tectonics of masculine longing, fear, and distrust. Rabe's Hurlyburly, one of the richest of these plays, anatomizes the homosocial quest for lasting male friendship in a world of fractured relations with women, corrupting work demands, and confused fraternal loyalties. What distinguishes this play from others of its kind is the singular linking of elegiac emotion with a tragicomic structure signifying promise and denial, arousal and defeat. On another level, Hurlyburly enacts what Raphael has called a “freestyle” initiation involving the “death of the boy” (4, 50-51): an inarticulate ritual of pain without clarification, of primitive emotion without adequate myth.

The central struggle for manhood in the play involves Eddie's attempts to retain and solidify his friendship with Phil over the objections of Mickey, the entrenched roommate with prior loyalty claims of his own. Mickey is necessarily displeased at the attention Eddie lavishes on Phil, as is Artie, who demands at one point, “So could you give me a hint as to the precise nature of the delusion with which you hype yourself about this guy … that you desert me for this fucking guy all the time” (100). The intense closeness of Eddie and Phil is only indirectly acknowledged in much of the play, as the hilarious antics and frequent comings and goings of the Gang of Four obscure the central dynamics. Yet at the end, Eddie's grief about Phil's death seems palpable as he struggles to articulate the intimacy he has lost: first by refusing Mickey's offer of consolation, then by exploding with a torrent of displaced pain at an unflappable, distant Johnny Carson, and finally, by pouring out his grief to Donna, who can only respond with irrelevant concerns of her own. Eddie remains alone with his loss, both psychologically and emotionally, as the strictures of his environment provide no intelligible context for his experience. The play thus takes on symbolic overtones of a confused, post-adolescent initiation during which Phil, the “boy,” is sacrificed for the development, however flawed, of Eddie.

The maturation pattern involving the “death of the boy” also requires the exclusion or demonization of women, traditionally seen in primitive initiation rituals (Van Gennep, qtd. in Raphael 4-5). Females, particularly mothers or mother-figures, are prohibited from participating in a process through which males solidify their bonds. In Hurlyburly, male exclusionary tactics include both de-humanizing treatment and verbal abuse of women: “Critics [have] emphasized that the three women in the play were the victims, pawns, or temporary playmates of the men” (Kolin 90). The male characters repeatedly refer to women as “ghouls” who “eat men alive” or “bitches” who “hate men,” who “nitpick,” “undermine,” or “get their hooks into” men (20, 22, 66, 150). At one point, Phil demands of Donna, “What are you, a chair? … Don't you have any self-respect?” (57).

Audiences of Hurlyburly have been less disturbed by the verbal barbs directed against women, however, than by their treatment as willing sexual and emotional commodities. All three females—Donna, Darlene, and Bonnie—seem embarrassingly available for the men's sexual gratification, only occasionally raising objections to egregious male behavior. Summoned by Eddie with no clear indication of her “purpose” (servicing Phil's sexual and psychological needs), Bonnie raises modest objections: “Is this particular guy just being ceremonial here with me, Eddie, or does he want to dick me?” (95). Only after Phil has pushed her out of her own moving car does Bonnie seriously object to the outrageous affronts to her dignity: “See … I am a form of human being just like any other” (111). Throughout this scene, Eddie worries primarily about Phil's fragile emotional state, as he assumes that Bonnie is available for any man on demand and therefore has, at best, only modest grounds for complaint: “Don't you fuck everybody you meet?” (112).

At the same time, much of the play is deliciously comic, attacking fundamentally sexist attitudes in contemporary American males, whom Rabe pillories in a powerful deconstruction of male fantasy of the eternally available woman. Both Donna and Bonnie exhibit a conspicuous, highly stylized willingness to be passed from one man to another without discrimination in either desire or result: both products, and victims, of conventional masculine degradation of women. Elsewhere, misogynist barbs arise out of contexts of male bravado, exaggeration, and myth-making, all clearly intended as satire. The quintessence of male comedy occurs at the end of Act II, as the four men hold forth about the delicate presence of Phil's infant daughter:

EDDIE:
This really makes me hate my ex-wife … I mean, I really hate my ex-wife.
ARTIE:
And this little innocent thing here, this sweet little innocent thing is a broad of the future.
MICKEY:
Hard to believe, huh?
EDDIE:
Awesome.
ARTIE:
Depressing.

(122)

Here, Rabe takes deliberate aim at male attitudes more exaggerated and stylized than in Mamet, where the authorial perspective less clearly distances itself from the sexist values of the characters.

While the women in Hurlyburly serve as convenient commodities for male reassurance and gratification, the primary emotions revolve around the feelings the men have for each other. Indeed, their relative indifference to women except for ready, socially sanctioned access to sexual intercourse is conspicuous. Eddie confesses that he hasn't “been interested in a woman for years, seriously, I have this horror show of a marriage in my background and everybody knows it …” (31-32). The self-dramatizing context of this confession leaves its seriousness open to question, but the pattern of tragicomic deflation is clear. Eddie's wonderfully comic half-seduction of Darlene in Act I later declines to infrequent encounters and his frank confession, in Act II, that “She doesn't love me … my girlfriend doesn't love me” (119). Eddie's repetitious “suck my dick” in the same sequence functions partly as displaced frustration, partly as mocking self-pity, and partly as comic mantra. Initially, Phil's response to Eddie's summoning of Bonnie for his benefit is lukewarm: “So call her” (88). In the context of male banter, Phil manages to work up a desperate, comic need for Bonnie's services, only to throw her out of the car later for no clear reason except “she smiled” (110). Apart from the off-stage pregnancy of his wife and its implied intimacy, Phil remains noticeably unsexual throughout the play. Mickey and Artie both participate in brief, essentially meaningless one-night stands on which little emotion is wasted.

The real emotion in Hurlyburly centers not on women but on Eddie, the status male of the group with whom the others seek to ally and thereby define themselves. Prior to the arrival of Phil, Mickey has had the greatest claims on Eddie, who maintains early on that Mickey is “my roommate, my best friend” (31). Mickey, however, is disturbed by Eddie and Phil's developing camaraderie: “Didn't I beg you to let me have some goddamn quiet this morning? Eddie, I begged you!” (23). Mickey seeks to “prevent Phil from being taken seriously by anyone,” while Eddie, in turn, begins to cast doubt on his prior relationship to Mickey: “See! And you'd know it, too, if you were my goddamn friend like you think you are” (24). As status male, Eddie has the power to dispense favors and friendship; the installation of Phil as clear “favorite” later leads Artie to lament Eddie's “delusion” about Phil, and Mickey to mock them as “two guys in love” (89, 100). Phil symbolically assumes the power of Eddie's patronage in Act I by asking to sleep in his bed, to which Eddie responds, “We'll do something later” (30). Mickey senses a “conspiracy” early on, which only intensifies as the play develops. Thus Eddie's friendship with Phil unfolds in a context of considerable jealousy and discontent in the other two men.

The relationship between Eddie and Phil corresponds to a long line of masculine friendships, dating in American literature from at least Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, in which a male “couple” composed of a higher status male and lower status male embark on a mutual adventure apart from the restrictive demands of women. Leslie Fiedler has admirably detailed the American male desire for a “holy marriage” to another man in the absence of women and sex:

In our native mythology, the tie between male and male is not only considered innocent, it is taken for the very symbol of innocence itself; for it is imagined as the only institutional bond in a paradisal world in which there are no (heterosexual) marriages or giving in marriage.

(350)

Hurlyburly falls obliquely in this literary tradition, which finds its American quintessence in Huckleberry Finn. The friendship between Eddie and Phil enacts itself in the liminal space of the men's apartment, unmoored from the social demands of work, family, hygiene, and communal responsibility. As the status male, Eddie serves as patron/mentor of the conspicuously younger and less experienced Phil, who seems “at sea” in maneuvering his way through life. Unmarked by the more conventional signifiers of race or class difference, their relationship embodies a tense dynamic between the self-destructive male psyche out of control and the masculine desire for a validating connection with other men.

Compared with the engaging innocence of Huckleberry Finn and other earlier narratives, recent treatments of homosocial desire have turned conspicuously decadent. The friendship between Bob and Don, his boss and mentor in Mamet's American Buffalo, is marked not only by violence and the infliction of pain but also by a confused inarticulateness at odds with feeling and desire. Male friendships in the work of playwrights like Shepard, Mamet, and Rabe generally seem defensive and tired, obscured by verbal gamesmanship and studied bravado, operating in a dark, nightmarish world situated in the underbelly of American society. Only rarely does emotional seriousness peek its head above the surface, as when Mickey, the commentator in crucial sections of Hurlyburly, accuses Eddie and Phil of being “in a fucking frenzy” (24).

Given the socio-sexual dynamics of the past several decades, it would be easy to read such comments as signifying latent sexual jealousy on Mickey's part and unacknowledged homosexuality on the parts of Eddie and Phil. In Hurlyburly, the context suggests superannuated adolescence in its dotage. The setting is a “clubhouse” or “power-center” for “the bachelor life,” where aging males in “mid-life crisis” can indulge in all the accoutrements of masculine living at its unrestricted, if decadent, best: moldy food, alcohol, TV, stereo, and plenty of high-grade drugs (Löffler 24; Rabe 48, 146). While the three women arrive on call to perform sexual favors—a male fantasy of long standing—wives are banished from the scene altogether. They only appear indirectly, through the unheard voice of Agnes in Eddie's telephone conversation, or through the presence of Phil's infant daughter at the end of Act II.

Otherwise, women's conventional expectations of men for companionship, fatherhood, and financial support are kept uneasily at bay offstage, allowing the apartment to remain a bastion of male freedom and desire. Unlike the picaresque partners of Cervantes and Twain, however, the males in David Rabe's adventure go nowhere, as Phil drives his car around and around: “… I'm spendin' days on the freeways … I been the last three days without seeing another form of human being in his entirety except gas station attendants” (71). Even Donna, who mimics the easy transience of the men, arrives from nowhere in particular, hitchhikes to places she doesn't know, rides for hours up and down a hotel elevator, and finally arrives back at the apartment for no clear reason. Phil's suicidal journey takes him to “a brief but unsustainable orbit … to land in a tree on the side of a cliff-like incline” (144). Rabe's “adventure” is one of confusion and self-destruction, of lack of direction and purpose. As Bonnie puts it, “It's a rough century all the way around … who does anybody know who's okay?” (110).

While the picaresque impulses of the central characters remain frustratingly unfulfilled, Eddie becomes increasingly caught up in the self-destructive excesses of Phil. The latter has in fact been married twice, his earlier marriage resulting in three children whom he hasn't seen “since I went to prison”: “I don't want any more kids out there, you know, rollin' around their beds at night with this sick fucking hatred of me. I can't stand it” (65). The friendship between Eddie and Phil, like other male partnerships in the American novel tradition, seems to thrive on social inequality. Eddie comes across as noticeably more mature and sophisticated than Phil, a suitable mentor for a man who has somehow destroyed two marriages and served time in jail, who moves through life in a “useless fucking orbit” (80). Phil values Eddie's talent for proffering advice: “This is our friendship—this conversation—these very exchanges. We are in our friendship. What could be more important?” (68).

Against this foundation of struggle for masculine validation and affection, overt sexuality in the play is expressed through females serving as “coins of the realm”—tokens of displaced intimacy exchanged among the men. All three women become involved in sexual, if not necessarily coital, ways with more than one of the four males: Donna has sex with Artie, is fondled by Mickey, and finally sleeps with Eddie; Darlene makes love with both Mickey and Eddie; and Bonnie, known to have slept with many men, is sent off to have sex with Phil and asked by Eddie to “suck his dick” (119). In addition to this ready interchange of women, largely without penalty of jealousy or undue complication, two of the men “pimp” for the others, as Eddie offers Darlene to Mickey and Bonnie to Phil, and Artie offers Donna to the other three men, having already enjoyed her himself. The men thus not only share but seek to share the women, who become communal sexual property of the locus virilis. Significantly, the wives remain offstage and unavailable for an exchange that serves to solidify relations among the men.

This masculine sharing of women can be said to manifest itself as displaced gratification for a more direct sexual act considered socially taboo or psychologically unacceptable. Eve Sedgwick has laid out the underlying dynamics of such sharing as it appears in English literature, whereby men obviate a forbidden intimacy between themselves by sleeping with the same woman:

“To cuckold” is by definition a sexual act, performed on a man, by another man. Its central position … emphasizes heterosexual love chiefly as a strategy of homosocial desire … by which men may attempt to arrive at satisfying relationships with other men.

(49-50)

Mickey's one-night stand with Darlene evidently began as an exchange for which he received permission: “the main point is, I asked” (32). In the opening scene, however, his grandiose offer to give her back to Eddie with a caveat—“maybe she's not as dynamic as you might think”—reveals no small amount of hostility and a breakdown in the relationship between the two men (34). The immediate cause is Phil, whose presence disrupts the intended intimacy between Mickey and Eddie achieved through Darlene. Periodically, Mickey's broken involvement with Darlene surfaces as a painful reminder of Eddie's vulnerability. Her reference to two rival lovers in Act III pricks Eddie into recalling, with some irritation, his own sexual rivalry with Mickey.

By contrast, the intimacy achieved when Eddie summons Bonnie to have intercourse with Phil, to soothe and refresh him, promises nothing but mutual enjoyment. Eddie even sells the arrangement: “… you're gonna love her. This is a bitch who dances naked artistically in this club. That's her trip” (89). The interaction between Eddie and Darlene in Act I features hilarious use of psychobabble to mask sexual strategies, but their involvement takes a conspicuous nosedive once Phil returns to his wife Suzie, a decision Eddie opposes as “carnage … gore on the highway … insane … fucking nuts” (66-67). In Act II, Eddie confesses to Bonnie that Darlene “doesn't love me” (119), and by Act III, Darlene complains upfront about their difficulty connecting:

I don't think there's a lot more we ought to, with any, you know, honesty, allow ourselves in the way of bullshit about our backgrounds to exonerate what is our just plain mean behavior to one another.

(138)

The problem arises from Eddie's preoccupation with the missing Phil, for whom he wants to “just hang around a little in case he calls” (130). Darlene serves as the primary means through which the two men solidify their masculine intimacy; once their friendship falters, the relationship with her cannot be maintained.

Like Darlene, Mickey feels increasingly detached from and frustrated with Eddie's behavior: “Could this be destiny in fact at work, Artie, and we are witnessing it?—the pattern in the randomness, so that we see it … from this apparent mess, two guys fall in love” (89). His real motive—to displace Phil as favorite and return to Eddie's singular graces—becomes clearer in Act III, Scene 3, when the men return from Phil's funeral. After Artie has headed home to sleep, Mickey crosses “behind Eddie, pats him on the back,” and asks, “How you doin', Edward?” The formality of his address is striking, as is the ferocity of Eddie's subsequent rejection of Mickey's attempt at reinstatement: “Fuck you about him, Mickey … I mean, where do you get the goddamn scorn to speak his name … And you never loved him either” (151). Disgusted, Mickey departs in defeat:

EDDIE:
You don't have any feelings at all.
MICKEY:
I don't have your feelings, Eddie; that's all. I have my own. They get me by.
EDDIE:
So what kind of friendship is this?
MICKEY:
Adequate. Good night.

(152)

This final scene is conspicuous for the difficulty all the characters have in naming the source of Eddie's grief. After a series of outpourings that prompts Mickey to call Eddie “a mess,” Mickey utters an astonishingly misdirected opinion: “I mean, to whatever extent THIS FUCKING TORMENT OF YOURS is over whatshername, Darlene, believe me, she isn't worth it” (152). Darlene's name has not been mentioned once in the prior dialogue, and her name promptly disappears again in the speech following. Later, as Eddie rails against Johnny Carson, the untouchable icon on inanimate TV, he can only try, unsuccessfully, to make a morbid joke about a guy who died, an astronaut who “went round the moon and ended up in Congress and had surgery for a malignancy in his nose, then passed away six months later” (154). Only in the presence of Donna can he begin to voice his pain by describing the lone singer at the funeral:

But then this guy from way in the back of the church would sing, and you couldn't hear the words even, just this high, beautiful, sad sound, this human sound, and we would all start to cry along with him. (He gasps, tries to breathe.)

(159)

This is as close as Eddie comes to communicating his sadness, but Donna can only respond by re-directing the conversation toward the geographic origins of her attire, which are, in any case, false. Having found no sympathetic outlet for his grief, Eddie lies down in Donna's arms—symbolically, without any sexual motives—in a final desperate attempt at human connection.

Thus the quest for close male friendship ends in failure and, even worse, in Eddie's inability to find anyone to share or even listen to his lament. A significant difficulty in communicating underlies the remarkable welter of words in this play, as the characters themselves don't understand what they are saying, let alone what they mean to say:

MICKEY:
I know what you think you're saying, but you're not saying it.
EDDIE:
I do. I do. I know what I'm saying. I don't know what I mean, but I know what I'm saying. Is that what you mean?

(150)

The self-protectively distant Mickey declares his friendship with Eddie “adequate,” departing with a final outburst of sarcasm: “Wait up for Phil, why don't you? Wouldn't that be great if Phil came by? To keep you company. I'm sure he will. He always did” (153). But Eddie cannot hear this outburst because he has the TV blaring, “set for life” (153). Johnny Carson cannot hear Eddie's monologue, and Donna cannot understand Eddie's tangled web of verbal associations. The resulting isolation is mitigated only by sleep and the nonverbal, impersonal sympathy of “pleasant dreams.”

This collapse at the end of Hurlyburly represents not only the deflation of desire typical of tragicomedy but also the breakdown of patriarchal order. The comic quest for a “men's temple,” where superannuated boys can play with no financial worries and no women to demand, limit, or condemn (Löffler 24), cannot forestall the insistent demands of the larger world and, ultimately, death. No mention is ever made of money or expenses, and work responsibilities play a decidedly limited role in this drama of male irresponsibility. Although Artie is said to have a career and attend meetings, Phil's professional potential seems distinctly limited, and Eddie's indifference to a required meeting in Act I indicates a cavalier attitude, at best, toward the demands of work. Most of the dramatic action takes place at night, without the restrictions of work-a-day reality. In both Act I scenes that take place during the day, characters lounge, take drugs, watch TV, and otherwise idle away their time. To the extent that work emerges as a subsidiary theme, it is summarily dismissed as corrupt and silly. Two major bosses are derided as a “scumbag faggot who likes to jerk tough guys like you around” and a “known anaconda” (28, 42). Both TV and film are denigrated as “total shit,” as Eddie includes himself with “every other whore in this town” (29, 30), recalling Mamet's Fox and Gould in Speed-the-Plow. Eddie and Phil revel in frequent orgies of obliteration which, under normal circumstances, would torpedo any career chances.

Rabe's play can be said to operate outside the strictures of work, career, money, and family, not unlike the fabled journey on the raft by Twain's famous duo. But the comic premise, the desire for escape and adventure, is not realized, leading Hurlyburly toward its essentially tragic conclusion. Rabe's play is not a “confused comedy,” as Beaufort would have it, but a tragicomedy of the central self-defeating male fantasy of our time. The comic elements arise from both the extremity of the men's situation—like that in Neil Simon's Odd Couple, adrift from the social moorings of wives and families—and from the blatant exaggerations and half-truths uttered in an atmosphere of ritualized linguistic license. Much of the play delightfully parodies an extreme form of rootlessness, addiction, and chauvinism current in masculine mythology since the rise of feminism. The seriousness of Phil's decline into suicide, however, signals both the breakdown of male friendship as a viable bond that can be sustained either apart from or in opposition to women, and the silencing of the need for male intimacy which has come to be seen as either “debased” (i.e., homosexual) or impossible. That the central characters view work as a “systematic scam” indicates their alienation from the previously cohesive patriarchal order, which has so broken down that men cannot help or mentor each other, but instead use or undermine other males to advance themselves in what Eddie calls the “reptilian hall of Hollywood fucking fame” (43).

Unlike the principal characters in Sexual Perversity in Chicago, American Buffalo, and Speed-the-Plow, Rabe's male “couple” is not reunited at the end of Hurlyburly. Mickey does not represent an adequate replacement for the lost Phil, and Donna offers only momentary solace for a man many years her elder. Eddie's descent into inexpressible isolation represents, on one level, the kind of masculine grief which Robert Bly attributes to the industrial displacement of the father as a significant force in the upbringing of young men. Attempting to fill the psychological gap, adult males seek other compensations to counteract an essential isolation they have difficulty even naming. Like the plays of Mamet and Shepard, Rabe's anatomize the masculine sense of loss in recent decades—of the father (Sticks and Bones) as of the friend or brother (Streamers). Underneath a shrewdly comic exterior, Rabe's Hurlyburly provides an even more extreme and elegiac variation on this theme of the American male losing an intimacy he knows not how to articulate. More than Streamers, with its multi-valent plot, the later play focuses on the primary relationship between Eddie and Phil and the consequences of its demise on the surrounding social fabric.

The atmosphere in Hurlyburly is one of exuberant decadence, confusion, and pain, accompanied by an inability to define and come to terms with experience. What differentiates Rabe's articulation of the homosocial quest is his successful reliance on comedy and satire, both realized and half-realized, as a means of revealing the dynamics of male intimacy and of masking the implications. Unlike Shepard and Mamet, whose work Hurlyburly mimics and parodies with gleeful abandon (Mickey blowing smoke into Donna's mouth, Eddie and Mickey's sex-conquest stories), Rabe consistently relies on crisply articulated satire as an important component of his playwriting repertoire. His women, while oppressed by the males on stage, nonetheless voice their own desires: “… you should certainly be told that in my opinion you are totally, one hundred percent, you know, with your head up your ass about me” (Darlene in Act II, 111). The “gender gap” which so concerned Frank Rich manifests itself in the men's “archaic sexual attitudes” (B4), while Rabe's satire points at something beyond: a genuine friendship lost, a potential sharing with women on something other than a sexual basis, with need finally exposed and acknowledged.

Viewed in a somewhat broader context, Hurlyburly represents yet another recent articulation of misguided initiation. According to Raphael, the contemporary absence of socially sanctioned rituals to demarcate the passage from boyhood to the more responsible arena of adult masculinity results in “freestyle variations” and “makeshift males” (50, 190). Not surprisingly, this often leads to misdirected violence and fails to prepare males psychologically for their essential place in society. In Hurlyburly, middle-aged males who still have not come to grips with their passage into manhood attempt to enact retrograde fantasies that can no more than halfway satisfy their cravings for escape, adventure, and fulfillment. In the absence of any clear mentoring by older males—who, like Artie, are ridiculed for devotion and hard work—the men in this play remain fundamentally unable to direct their energies constructively into work, marriage, family, or society.

Works Cited

Barnes, Clive. “Rabe's Hurlyburly Pins Holywood to the Wall.” New York Post 22 June 1984: 43.

Beaufort, John. “Hurlyburly Is Confused Comedy.” Christian Science Monitor 3 July 1984: 27.

Bly, Robert. A Gathering of Men. With Bill Moyers. PBS Interview. WILL, Champaign-Urbana. 8 Jan. 1990.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Stein and Day, 1966.

Kolin, Philip. David Rabe: A Stage History and A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1988.

Löffler, Sigrid. “Das herrliche Geschlecht.” Die Zeit 27 April 1990: 24.

Mamet, David. American Buffalo. New York: Grove, 1976.

———. Sexual Perversity in Chicago. With The Duck Variations. New York: Grove, 1981.

———. Speed-the-Plow. New York: Grove, 1987.

Rabe, David. Hurlyburly. New York: Grove, 1985.

———. In the Boom Boom Room. New York: Knopf, 1975.

———. Sticks and Bones. In The Basic Training of Paulo Hummel and Sticks and Bones. New York: Viking, 1976.

———. Streamers. New York: Knopf, 1977.

Raphael, Ray. The Men from the Boys: Rites of Passage in Male America. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989.

Rich, Frank. “Theatre's Gender Gap Is a Chasm.” New York Times 30 Sept. 1984: B1, 4.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.