[In the following essay, Barbera details the dramatic techniques used by Rabe to express what W. B. Yeats called the “emotion of multitude.”]

In a single-paragraph essay on drama, “Emotion of Multitude,” W. B. Yeats makes a dramatic claim about what “all the great masters have understood.” “There cannot be great art,” he says, “without the little limited life of the fable, which is always the better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it.” What Yeats calls the “emotion of multitude” is evoked when a playwright is able to stimulate our imagination, so we feel the drama ringing out into wider significance. And how do playwrights so stimulate our imagination? Greek drama “got the emotion of multitude from its chorus,” Yeats tells us, and Shakespearian drama from “the subplot which copies the main plot.” In the realist drama of Ibsen, Yeats goes on to say, greater import is suggested by vague symbols (such as the wild duck in the attic) “that set the mind wandering from idea to idea, emotion to emotion.”

David Rabe's Streamers provides an excellent focus for consideration of techniques by which plays transcend the particularities of their plots, because it employs a number of those techniques. Its simple story of the interaction of a few soldiers in a Virginia barracks, awaiting assignments during the Vietnam War, does expand in meaning. It matters not that the Vietnam War seems a long time ago; Streamers contains news which remains news—which is one definition of a classic.

Praise for the play has not been wanting. Streamers won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the best American play of 1976, and also a Drama Desk Award and the Los Angeles Drama Critic's Circle Award in 1977. It is, according to one authority, “beyond doubt Rabe's most frequently performed play,” and his “masterpiece” (Kolin History 74, 67); and the entry in a respected reference work declares that Streamers “has the promise of becoming a new American classic” (Patterson 178). In addition to the play's many productions in this country and abroad, its audience has been increased by a 1983 United Artists screen version.

A reviewer for the Irish production of Streamers characterized it as “a depiction with photographic realism of a slice of brutalised life” (Rushe). The claim is true, as far as it goes; but if such a depiction were all the play is, it would not, in Yeats's terms, evoke multitude. Streamers suggests much beyond the slice of life it depicts: as Janet Hertzbach has pointed out, the characters constitute “a credible microcosm of American society at large” (183), and, I would add, a microcosm of humanity itself. This is one way, then, in which Rabe's play evokes multitude: the characters are a microcosm which reflects the macrocosm. What happens to them has significance for all Americans, and even for all humanity.

Although the four main characters of Streamers are males of similar age, the otherwise large diversity which makes them a credible microcosm is easy to see. Richie and Billy, who share a large cadre room with Roger, are white, and Roger is black. Richie's sexual desires are gay, while Roger's and Billy's are straight. Richie is from Manhattan (48), Billy from rural Wisconsin ([44] he refers to times in his youth he'd drive “to the big city” [38]). Richie seems to come from a well-to-do background (he says he has always had “Money for whatever I wanted” [23]), Billy probably from the middle class, and Roger probably from a lower economic class. Billy is a college graduate (66), and so has had a level of schooling the others do not seem to share (Richie points out that Billy has had a lot of education [12, 60]).

The fourth main character is Carlyle, another black who, like Roger, comes from a rougher background than Richie and Billy: “I been on the street all my life; he brings back home” (55), Roger says of Carlyle. Carlyle enters the cadre room shared by Richie, Billy, and Roger because he has heard another black man is living there, and he is looking for a friend. Carlyle is adrift, and extremely uncomfortable in the army: “I hate this goddamn army” (17) he says. In this he contrasts with Billy, who tells Roger, “You and me more regular army than the goddamn sergeants around this place” (9). Billy thinks the Vietnam War is a just cause (25), Roger is patriotic but has doubts about the war (24-25), and Carlyle says to Roger, “It ain't our war nohow because it ain't our country” (18). Carlyle's sexual interests are flexible. He brags about “dodgin' bullets … since I been old enough to get on pussy make it happy to know me” (51), and he initiates a trip to a brothel with Roger and Billy. But he also desires sex with Richie. Carlyle is an unstable personality, friendly one minute, menacing the next, and unsure of how to act around whites. Roger in contrast is easygoing, able to get along with Carlyle, but comfortable too with his white roommates—earnest Billy and camp Richie. “The war—the threat of it” is what these men have in common: it is, the stage directions tell us, “the one thing they share” (24).

Despite the suitability of these four characters as representatives of different races, sexual identities, values, temperaments, and social, educational and economic backgrounds, they do not come across as cardboard abstractions. After seeing the New York production, one critic wrote of his feeling that he knew each of them personally (Reed). Indeed, so effective is Rabe's character portrayal in Streamers, it is possible to get caught up in the play without realizing the men's status as society writ small.

In a “bald statement” matching in audacity Yeats's remark about what all the great masters have understood, Arthur Miller said that “all plays we call great, let alone those we call serious, are ultimately involved with some aspect of a single problem. It is this: How may a man make of the outside world a home?” (73). Of the four main characters in Streamers, Carlyle seems to have the most difficulty adjusting to his new life, away from his friends, in the larger world of the army. He would like Roger and his white buddies to accept him as part of “one big happy family” (59). As he says to Richie, complaining about the army, “It like they think I ain't got no notion what a home is. No nose for no home—like I ain't never had no home. I had a home” (49). Besides the diversity which makes the main characters of Streamers a microcosm, the iterated word “home” and its variant “house” provide the play's simple plot with a metaphoric resonance, which again evokes the emotion of multitude.

When Richie and Carlyle ask Billy and Roger to leave the cadre room so they can engage in sex, there is a heated exchange. Roger, not wanting to leave, tells the outsider, Carlyle, “Man, we live here,” to which Richie responds, “It's my house, too, Roger; I live here, too” (62). Eventually Roger drops on his bed, covers himself with a blanket, and says: “Fine. He your friend. This your home. So that mean he can stay. It don't mean I gotta leave” (62). He advises Billy to ignore them, too, but Billy is outraged. He tells Richie and Carlyle to “go on out in the bushes,” asserting “it ain't gonna be done in my house” (63). When Richie gives in, saying to Carlyle, “Let's go outside,” Carlyle protests, “Is this you house or not?” (64). Walter Kerr, noting the significance of the house metaphor, points out:

Now that's a peculiar word, really, to be describing a barren shed, mere planking thrown up in a prefab rush. … What does Mr Rabe mean by it? And what does he mean a few minutes later when the interfering liberal [Billy], having had the palm of his hand slashed and his gut pierced by Carlyle's knife, is writhing on the floor in his own blood, piteously pulling a blanket over himself as though humiliated? His black buddy [Roger], the one he once talked “friendly” to, makes a gesture of comfort, of assistance. He is screamed at, called a “nigger,” for his pains. Has the liberal's liberalism been a posture … ?

The message of the play, Kerr states, is that “We are all—black, white, straight, queer, parents, children, friends, foes, stable, unstable—living together in the same ‘house.’ And we can't do it.” Toward the end of his review (in language echoing Arthur Miller's) Kerr observes: “That we cannot coexist, that man cannot make a home of the universe … is not a customary dramatic truth.” We may admire the play, he concludes, “But how many of us are willing to make a bedmate of despair?”

Later I will return to Kerr's assessment of the play, but for now I want to note that the two techniques I've mentioned so far, by which Streamers takes on wider meaning—the characters as microcosm and the iterated metaphor of home—are related to one of the techniques Yeats mentions in his “Emotion of Multitude” essay, i.e., the subplot. For if the four main characters constitute a failed family, the sergeants in the play, as father figures for that family, both extend the microcosm by inclusion of men in their fifties (28), and are echoed by other fathers and father figures mentioned in the play. Yeats's example of a play with a father subplot is Hamlet, in which “one hardly notices, so subtly is the web woven, that the murder of Hamlet's father and the sorrow of Hamlet are shadowed in the lives of Fortinbras and Ophelia and Laertes, whose fathers, too, have been killed.” In Streamers it is not the harm done to fathers, but that done to sons, and the fathers' ineffectiveness or complicity, which reverberates.

That sergeants Rooney and Cokes are failures as fathers to the young men in the cadre room is obvious. Roger refers to Rooney as a “Booze hound” (18), Cokes himself says “I'm drunk all the time” (35), and, as if in confirmation, we never see either of the sergeants on stage sober. Nor do we see them teaching the men anything that will help them survive battle. Rather, they teach them a song about “what a man sings” (34) when he is about to die. Their ineffectiveness and clownish behavior is underlined by Cokes's account of his game of hide-and-seek with Rooney after a day in which their drunkenness brought about “four goddamn accidents and fights” (80), and by Rooney's inability, later that day, to prevent his own murder when confronting the knife-wielding Carlyle.

The ineffective and destructive father figures, Cokes and Rooney, have their subplot parallels in the actual fathers of Richie and Carlyle, and in the world leaders mentioned in the play. Richie relates how his father “started drinking and staying home making model airplanes and boats and paintings by the numbers” (58). Then one day, coming home from kindergarten, Richie saw his father leave, never to return. Carlyle, too, grew up without a father. His mother told him the neighborhood butcher was his father, and he believes her, although the man denied it. On the international level, the world leaders mentioned in Streamers were unable to prevent wars, or contributed to them. Three recent wars are touched upon when Billy likens Hitler's invasion of Poland and North Korea's invasion of South Korea to Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. In reply, Roger points out that “There is folks, you know, who are sayin' L.B.J. is the Hitler” (25).

Philip Kolin, who has written about the father subplot in Streamers, cites another instance—in addition to the boys' actual fathers, the sergeants, and world leaders. It has to do with a story Billy tells about his buddy, Frankie. “The whole point” of his story, Billy insists, is that Frankie was “a tough little cat.” They and their friends fell into the habit of letting “some queer pick us up … sort of.” They'd get free liquor and meals, “and we'd turn 'em on,” but when the men, “most of 'em old guys,” would invite the boys home, they'd call them “fag and queer … and tell them to kiss off.” It was “a good deal” if they “were low on cash or needed a laugh,” Billy says, but one day Frankie told him he was going home with the man he was with. “What does it matter who does it to you,” Frankie said, “you close your eyes, a mouth's a mouth.” Billy tried to talk him out of it, to no avail. The next day Frankie reported that it had been “a cool scene,” and that he'd made a lot of money playing poker with the man. Frankie enjoyed this life and “stayed at it,” Billy says, and then he dropped the girlfriend he was crazy about, and who was crazy about him. “He had got his ass hooked,” Billy concludes, “one day he woke up and he was on it. … and he come to me wailin' one day … and he was a fag” (37-39).

Billy seems to assume that, because Frankie was tough and had a girlfriend, he did not have homosexual desires before he went home with the man. And so he further assumes that being a “fag” is the result of addiction: at least, that is the implication of his phrasing that Frankie got “hooked,” found himself one day “on it.” It is telling that Richie, whose homosexual experience gives him an insider's perspective, responds to the cautionary tale about Frankie by saying that Billy is “a storyteller” (39).

Consider the story of Frankie as Richie might understand it. At puberty Frankie was confused about his sexual identity, and acted tough and had a girlfriend (whom he may indeed have liked) in part to be respected among his friends. But he sought to be picked up by men, so long as his friends saw it as a way of taking advantage of those men to obtain liquor and meals. Eventually he became comfortable enough with the men to have sex with one or more of them, although at first he rationalized this by saying he was in it for the easy life, and the gender of his sex partner didn't really matter. When he finally stopped pretending about his homosexual desires, he became upset about no longer belonging to his former world, which would now view him scornfully as a “faggot,” as Billy, in fact, does view him. (To Richie this crisis might be seen as a necessary if painful step on Frankie's journey toward self-acceptance.)

Commenting on Billy's story, Kolin remarks that he “has been scared” by his memory of “father figures who have seduced—and destroyed—youth.” “Rabe offers an ironic parallel here,” Kolin goes on: “young men are ensnared by old homosexuals the same way they are trapped by Army fathers like Cokes and Rooney” (Explicator 64). I don't find the parallel convincing, and I doubt that Rabe intends it. (Later I will suggest that Sergeant Cokes, despite his faults, is Rabe's spokesman when he says it's okay to be “a queer.”) The men who picked up Billy and his friends were not in a position of authority or responsibility with respect to them the way a father, a sergeant, or even a national leader would be. They were just strangers Billy and his friends used. The term “father figure” might apply in Frankie's case, but then it would be in the sense that Frankie was seeking a sugar daddy—maybe even a sugar daddy to whom his heart might belong. That Frankie was “ensnared” is a judgment hard to reconcile with what we are told: against Billy's advice he willingly had sex with a man. Consent would seem to exclude ensnarement, unless one thinks, as Billy does, in terms of eventual addiction. The possibility that Frankie wanted to have sex with the man he went with is so difficult for Billy to conceive, that addiction is how he explains Frankie's becoming a “fag.”¹

The alternative interpretation, which I speculated Richie might offer, seems more plausible than Billy's, because it assumes that sexual desire leads to sexual acts, and not vice-versa. One might, for material gain or merely to experiment, engage in sexual acts one does not desire, but it seems unlikely one would then become addicted to those acts. Of course, I may be wrong: theories about sexuality abound, and people differ and are complicated. In fact, it is the tension among the characters, stemming from their different understanding of and attitudes toward sex between males, which points to a fourth way Streamers evokes multitude, i.e., by its broad theme of the difficulty of human communication. When it comes to deep-seated assumptions, desires, and fears, people often find it difficult to take in views contrary to their own. We see the truth of this with respect to each of the play's four main characters.

Early in the play Billy tells Roger that ever since the three of them were assigned to the cadre room, Richie has “been different somehow” (14). The difference seems to be the result of Richie's no longer putting up a front (the female pinup in his locker may have been part of that front), of his putting a foot out of the closet by way of jokes. He asks Billy to go to a movie, and when Billy also invites Roger, he says, “How are we going to kiss and hug and stuff if he's there?” (13). Billy is not amused and, if Richie is in earnest, Billy cannot tolerate his desire good naturedly, the way he might that of a woman for whom he had no reciprocal desire. “What you do on the side, that's your business,” Billy tells Richie, “but if you don't cut the cute shit with me, I'm gonna turn you off” (22). Even before this showdown, the stage directions tell us Billy's censoriousness causes Roger to sense “something unnerving” (14).

I agree with Philip Kolin that Billy “has been scared” by his memory of what happened to Frankie. The name for that kind of fear is “homophobia.” If even a guy like Frankie could become a “faggot,” there is reason to guard against a similar fate for oneself, and to object vehemently to any expression of homosexual desire toward oneself or in one's presence. Billy is furious when, at the end of Act I, Richie pats Carlyle's arm (42); and in Act II, when Richie rubs his foot against Carlyle's, we are told the sight fills Billy “with fear” (61).

It is possible Billy's homophobia stems partly from latent homosexual desires, and at least one production of the play gave him a lot of stage business to suggest just that.² But while his strong reactions could be the result of repressed desires, they are not necessarily so. Aside from Billy's protesting perhaps too much, there is no indication in the text that he is sexually attracted to men, as there is that he is sexually attracted to women (he seems to have enjoyed going to the brothel with Roger and Carlyle, and in a conversation with Roger, one senses his romantic interest in a waitress [44]). Even if Billy does have latent homosexual desires, they would appear to be so latent that there's no chance he'd give Richie a tumble. Yet Richie persists in wishful thinking, taking the stance, only half in jest, that Billy wants him, but just doesn't know how to go about it. When Billy is annoyed and hits him in the chest with a basketball, for example, Richie instructs him, “the ruffian approach will not work with me” (46). Later he warns Billy that if he doesn't become more decisive, Carlyle's “gonna steal me right away” (60).

Richie not only wants to communicate his homosexual identity and his attraction to Billy, he wants Billy and Roger to accept him for what he is: “it's not such a terrible thing” (21), he tells Roger. But this is not a message Roger and Billy are prepared to hear. Even those “queers” Billy thinks are okay, because they do not question his straight sexual identity, he considers to be way up a bad alley (14). Roger would hardly disagree. He tells of a childhood incident in which “the baddest man on the block” was beating up a “screamin' goddamn faggot,” who then bounced into Roger. “When he hit, he gave his ass this little twitch, man, like he thought he was gonna turn me on. I'd never a thought that was possible, man, for a man to be twitchin' his ass on me, just like he thought he was a broad. Scared me to death” (23). But Roger seems more accepting than Billy. If he doesn't want to believe in Richie's homosexual identity, it is in part because that would create tension in the cadre room, and he is by temperament a peacemaker. Also, it goes against his assumptions to think of a person who enlists as a “fag” (27). After Richie is explicit about his sex life, Roger responds, “maybe you think you've tried it, but that don't make you it” (23). Even Billy, late in the play, warns Richie, “you're gonna have us all believin' you are just what you say you are” (60). It's not so much that Billy doesn't already believe it, as that he doesn't want to believe it.

The breakdown in communication, because the characters believe what they want to believe and evade what they don't want to believe, extends to Carlyle. He wants to believe that Billy and Roger are using Richie sexually, as a “punk,” because that is what he wants to do (52, 61). He takes Billy's denial as an attempt to exclude him and seems to believe Roger and Billy are going back on a tacit agreement, entered into when they went with him to the brothel, to share Richie (“I THOUGHT WE MADE A DEAL!” he hollers [63]).

The characters' failures to communicate are epitomized in the exchange that takes place between Richie and Roger after Carlyle murders Billy and Sergeant Rooney.

ROGER:
… all the time you was a faggot, man; you really was. You shoulda jus' tole ole Roger …
RICHIE:
I've been telling you. I did.
ROGER:
Jive, man, jive!
RICHIE:
No!
ROGER:
You did bullshit all over us! ALL OVER US!
RICHIE:
I just wanted to hold his hand, Billy's hand, to talk to him, go to the movies hand in hand like he would with a girl or I would with someone back home.
ROGER:
But he didn't wanna; HE didn't wanna. …
RICHIE:
He did.
ROGER:
No, man.
RICHIE:
He did. He did. It's not my fault.

(77-78)

A fifth way I would like to suggest that Streamers evokes the emotion of multitude is by Rabe's inclusion in the play of two images of violent death—John Simon refers to them as the play's “master” images (22). They are brought up in the reminiscences of Sergeant Cokes. A streamer, Cokes explains, is a parachute which goes straight up above the paratrooper, failing to open. He remembers one man who went right by him, his parachute streaming, while he reached desperately upwards with both hands and began to claw at the sky, his legs pumping up and down. Another man Cokes remembers falling to his death was not strictly speaking a streamer. O'Flannigan was a joker who said he would pull his chute release lever in midair, “reach up, grab the lines and float on down, hanging. … So I seen him pull the lever at five hundred feet and he reaches up to two fistfuls a air, the chute's twenty feet above him, and he went into the ground like a knife” (32). Cokes and Rooney sing “Beautiful Streamer” for Billy, Richie, and Roger—the song I alluded to earlier, supposedly sung by those whose chutes do not open as they fall to their death:

Beautiful streamer,
Open for me,
The sky is above me,
But no canopy.

(34)

The other master image of violent death, also recalled by Sergeant Cokes, stems from a Korean War incident: he remembers “this little guy in his spider hole, which is a hole in the ground with a lid over it. … I dropped a grenade into his hole. … Then sat on the lid, him bouncin' and yellin' under me. Bouncin' and yellin' under the lid. I could hear him. Feel him. I just sat there” (33).

These images of death by falling, and death by being exploded in a confined space, function like the vague symbols Yeats noted in the plays of Ibsen, symbols “that set the mind wandering from idea to idea, emotion to emotion.” In a sense the master images contrast: one is of terrifying and absolute exposure, falling through the air; the other of terrifying enclosure. Both apply to the play's main characters. They are all in free fall, not in control of their fate, at the mercy of luck, cut off from the supports they had in civilian life. They are also all trapped, under pressure, until there is an explosion. Or consider again. Carlyle is the grenade tossed into the cadre room, yet Carlyle, trapped in the army, is like the man trapped in the spider hole. Victimizer and Victim. Like Cokes who laments the man in the spider hole, saying he was like Charlie Chaplin: Roger, feeling sad for Cokes, says “Sergeant … maybe you was Charlie Chaplin, too” (83).³ We are all in a ridiculous posture. Turn the images over again, they can imply their opposites, aspects of the good life. Falling through the air, if your parachute is working and no one is shooting at you, can be an exhilarating experience of freedom (“Beautiful feelin',” as Rooney says [31]). Carlyle wants escape, freedom from the army. But being snug in a hole can suggest security and home. Carlyle wants to belong to the “family” in the cadre room.

In sum, I have argued that Streamers evokes the emotion of multitude: first, by its characters, who form a credible microcosm; second, by the iterated words “house” and “home,” which constitute a powerful metaphor (the men trying to live together in the barracks are like all of us trying to live together in the world); third, by a reverberating subplot of failed fathers; fourth, by the broad theme of the difficulty of communication; and fifth, by the two master images of exposure and enclosure, which stimulate our imagination, setting our minds wandering from idea to idea, emotion to emotion. The film of Streamers, which was directed by Robert Altman and for which Rabe wrote the screenplay, employs yet another technique for evoking multitude—a version of the first technique mentioned by Yeats. Periodically we glimpse a soldier in the cadre room who speaks only once, at the beginning of the film, in answer to questions barked by Sergeant Rooney. Most of the times we see him, he is peeking out from under the covers of his bed. He is, in effect, a silent chorus, for his silence “speaks” eloquently of his dread at the tension and violence in the room. He is a witness within the play to the play, evoking those other witnesses, the audience, representatives of the wider human community.

I would like to close by going back to Walter Kerr's suggestion that Streamers leaves us in despair, with its “message” that we Americans, we human beings, cannot live together in the same house. I would rather put it that the play shows what must be overcome if we are to live together. David Rabe has commented that, ultimately, Streamers is saying “it should be possible not to get caught up in the struggles that are in the play, the judgments of one another, the treacheries and lies, however harmless” (qtd. in Kolin History 72). The play says this, if it says it at all, through Sergeant Cokes, who has come to a measure of tolerance and compassion by reflecting upon his leukemia. When Roger tells Cokes that Richie is crying “'cause he's a queer,” Cokes replies:

Don't be yellin' mean at him. Boy, I tell you it's a real strange thing the way havin' leukemia gives you a lotta funny thoughts about things. Two months ago—or maybe even yesterday—I'da called a boy who was a queer a lotta awful names. But now I just wanna be figurin' things out.

(81)

After assuring Richie that “it's okay” to be “a queer,” Cokes goes on to say he can never forget the man he killed in the spider hole in Korea, and “I'd let him out now, he was in there” (82). The play ends powerfully, with Cokes singing “Beautiful Streamer” in pseudo Korean, after surmising the man in the hole was singing it when he died. Rabe's stage directions tell us Cokes “begins with an angry, mocking energy that slowly becomes a dream, a lullaby, a farewell, a lament” (83).

Streamers shows us characters whose misunderstandings, selfishness, and defense mechanisms prevent them from having the tolerance and compassion that would help make their world a home. Sergeant Cokes breaks through these barriers as a result of his reflection upon having leukemia. Perhaps others can be helped to break through them by reflecting upon the suffering and bloodshed Rabe depicts in his play. Humanity's grip on tolerance and compassion is perpetually slippery. We need to be reminded of their necessity over and over. Which is why I said early in this essay that Streamers conveys news which remains news. Who would deny that it is better to get that news through the vicarious tragedy of art, than through suffering and bloodshed?

Notes

1. When Richie asks Billy if the story about Frankie is really about himself, Billy is furious and says Richie's brain is “truly rancid!” He then mentions a possible cause of sexual identity other than addiction, saying, “Do you know there's a theory now it's genetic?” How seriously Billy takes such a theory is unclear but, in any case, he attributes Richie's brain rot to “it,” by which he appears to mean his homosexual identity (54).

2. Gary Sinese played Billy in the Steppenwolf Theatre Company's Washington D.C. summer of '85 production of Streamers. In Sinese's portrayal, according to Deborah C. Payne, “The nervous chewing of a dogtag, the sideways glance, the forced laugh all reveal a young man not yet come to terms with his homosexuality” (109).

3. The victim/victimizer motif extends, of course, to Richie, Billy, and Roger. Richie cannot be open about himself around Billy and Roger without Billy expressing contempt and Roger going into denial, responses Richie finds offensive (“Stupidity offends me; lies and ignorance offend me” [60]). Richie in turn goads Billy, and shares responsibility for the eventual violence in the cadre room.

Works Cited

Hertzbach, Janet. “The Plays of David Rabe: A World of Streamers.” Essays on Contemporary American Drama. Ed. Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim. Munich: Hueber, 1981. 173-86.

Kerr, Walter. “David Rabe's ‘House’ Is Not a Home.” New York Times 2 May 1976: B5.

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

———. “David Rabe's Streamers.” Explicator 45 (Fall 1986): 63-64.

Miller, Arthur. “The Family in Modern Drama.” Atlantic Monthly Apr. 1956: 35-41. Rpt. in The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller. Ed. Robert A. Martin. New York: Viking, 1978. 69-85.

Patterson, James A. “David Rabe.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, 7, pt. 2 (Twentieth Century American Dramatists). Detroit: Gale, 1982.

Payne, Deborah C. “Streamers.” Rev. of Streamers by David Rabe. Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Washington, D.C. Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present 1 (1986): 107-9.

Rabe, David. Streamers. 1977. The Vietnam Plays: Volume Two. New York: Grove, 1993. 1-84.

Reed, Rex. “Streamers Shatters Broadway's Doldrums.” Rev. of Streamers by David Rabe. Mitzi Newhouse Theater. Lincoln Center, New York. New York Daily News 23 Apr. 1976: 70.

Rushe, Desmond. “Ugly Face of Army Brutalisation.” Rev. of Streamers by David Rabe. Irish Independent [Dublin] 3 Oct. 1978: 7.

Simon, John. “Playwright's Progress.” Rev. of Streamers by David Rabe. Mitzi Newhouse Theater. Lincoln Center, New York. The New Leader 21 June 1976: 21-22.

Yeats, W.B. “Emotion of Multitude.” Essays and Introductions. New York: Collier, 1968. 215-16.