SOURCE: Kolin, Philip C. “Staging Hurlyburly: David Rabe's Parable for the 1980s.” Theatre Annual 41 (1986): 63-78.

[In the following essay, Kolin identifies the major themes of Hurlyburly and illustrates “how language, costume, gesture, movement, and stage symbol reveal character and idea” in the play.]

Hurlyburly is David Rabe's auspicious seventh and most recent play. According to Jack Kroll, the play “made theatrical history of a sort.”¹ After a brief run at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, Hurlyburly was staged successfully in New York, not on Broadway but on off-Broadway, at the relatively small Promenade Theatre in the middle of the summer of 1984. It was directed by Mike Nichols (who also directed Rabe's earlier Streamers), boasted an all-star cast including Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt, Jerry Stiller, and others, and then, financially fortified, went on to 343 Broadway performances. While not all the reviews were rave, overall they were encouraging. Besides the praise from Kroll (“a powerful, permanent contribution to American drama”), Frank Rich observed that “Hurlyburly offers some of Mr. Rabe's most inventive and disturbing writing in a production of any playwright's dreams.”² Robert Brustein predicted that Hurlyburly “may well go down in theatre history as a watershed of American playwrighting.”³ While Clive Barnes recognized Hurlyburly to be “an important play,”⁴ Gerald Weales proclaimed that it deserved a Tony, awarded that year to Biloxi Blues instead.⁵

Whether Hurlyburly made theatre history or not, it did further expand Rabe's vision of an America suffering from confusion, violence, and an obsession with image making. More specifically, Rabe presents in Hurlyburly a parable about the drug generation of the 1980s. After identifying the major thematic points in Hurlyburly, this study will explore the theatrical representation of Rabe's message. Focusing on the acoustical, visual, and physical elements in the play, I will show how language, costume, gesture, movement, and stage symbol reveal character and idea.

Appropriately titled, Hurlyburly portrays the sometimes comic but morally disabling tumult unraveling contemporary American society, aptly symbolized by Hollywood's creative, coke-snorting community. It is the land of Hollyweed (as pranksters christened the mythic land of dreams), the world of hop heads, head shops, and rhinestone anthropoids. Reflecting the national preoccupation with drugs, Hurlyburly may win an award for presenting more “pharmaceutical experiments”⁶ on stage than any other American play, including the alcoholic record established by Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In addition to coke, Rabe's characters indulge in booze, hashish, pot, uppers and downers. They snort up or swill down from early morn to early morn.

All their experimentation takes place in a Hollywood Hills house shared by Eddie and Mickey, two casting directors. Visiting them are two male friends, Artie, a fiftyish screenwriter, seedy and selfish, and Phil, a would-be actor, ex-con, and violent personality better endowed with strength than looks. Into this male melee Rabe introduces three women—Darlene, a photojournalist; Donna, a fifteen year old who has sex at the drop of a cigarette ash; and Bonnie, a call girl who does amusing tricks with balloons and who resembles a more seasoned Chrissy from Rabe's In the Boom Boom Room. Also heavy drug users, these women are accustomed to being sexually or physically abused, or both. The Hollywood house, where all the action takes place, is the new battleground of the 1980s (replacing the actual Viet Nam of The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel or the Army barracks of Streamers) for sexual and territorial combat.

Through his long three hour play, Rabe powerfully links the themes of desperation and dehumanization. As in his earlier plays, the characters in Hurlyburly live in a world that lacks feelings and warmth. They reside in what has been termed the “limbo of the lost,”⁷ a world without shape or form. In trying desperately to make sense out of reality, their words and gestures are empty, hurlyburly. They ask questions but cannot create a useful reality, in part because of the drug haze engulfing them and in part because they—like Pavlo, Ozzie, Harriet, and Ricky, or the girls in the Boom Boom Room or the boys in Streamers—cannot make contact as human beings. They have severed connections, aborted relationships. The men are divorced, estranged from wife, children misanthropic, and philandering. The women make love for money, for the shadow of affection, or for no reason at all. Darlene, for example, switches lovers—housemates Eddie and Mickey—overnight without regret or anxiety. In short, Rabe's characters either accept their sordid existence with cynicism or they look for the easy fix or the feeble lie that will make life more convenient but never more meaningful.

Almost all of Rabe's cocaine-sniffers (except Donna, the teenage vagabond) fancy themselves artists, creators—actors, directors, screenwriters, photojournalists. No artists of the beautiful, though, they try desperately to create an image for themselves or to ridicule or destroy someone else's. They do all of their creating by playing games, the chief activity in much postmodern literature. In their “California speak,” an amalgam of post-Freudian snippets and convoluted constructions, they ask an endless series of questions hoping to stumble onto meaning, groping to find the answer that makes the question worthwhile. Mickey, for example, asks “So what does it mean?” The answer, of course, is neither certain nor comforting. Rabe's Hollywoodites unintentionally confront destiny—why things happen. But nothing works out as they planned or hoped for. The reason is pessimistically clear—“Nothing is necessary.” In the parlance of Hollywood, Eddie informs Bonnie that “We're all just background in one another's life.” They cannot be in the foreground because they refuse to accept or give love. The only way to exist is to become a thing. Eddie prosaically announces: “Be harder. … Be a thing and live.”

The sound and fury in the characters' lives is dramatically realized in the way they communicate and in their view of communication itself. Language—or its abuse and loss of significance—is one of Rabe's prime targets.⁸ As in the ritualistic but hollow chants in Pavlo Hummel or the cruel cliches of Sticks and Bones, Rabe reveals the bankruptcy of language to express values and dreams. Language for Rabe's characters is empty, stripped of meaning or sincerity. In Hurlyburly, they use it to conceal, not reveal, their thoughts and fears. As Darlene exclaims after listening to Eddie's gibberish masquerading as logical discourse, “I can't stand this goddam semantic insanity anymore.” Language—the way it is spoken and heard—opens the door to the madhouse of the mind.

Early in the play, Rabe alerts the audience to the characters' inability to express and desire to conceal anything meaningful. “It is worth noting that in the characters' speeches phrases such as ‘whatchamacallit,’ ‘thingamigig,’ ‘blah-blah-blah,’ and ‘rapateta,’ abound. These are phrases used by the characters to keep themselves talking and should be said unhesitatingly with the authority and conviction with which one would have in fact said the missing word.” Such speech might be regarded as gratuitous verbal high-jinks, but it does serve a vital dramatic purpose. These nonsense words substitute for sincere expression and surface at the most intimate moments. In the midst of a sensitive discussion about Eddie's feelings for Darlene, whom Mickey made love to casually the night before, Eddie spews out “blah-blah-blah—my heart is broken—blah-blah-blah.” Eating a stale English muffin, the unconcerned Mickey shoots back, “Blah-blah-blah. Absolutely. So you want me to toast you what's left of the muffin?” What could have been a poignant confrontation with truth becomes a foolish exchange that concludes with a pathetic non sequitur. Similarly, when Mickey later excoriates Phil for lack of personal stability, the filler words become a buffer for sincere expression: “You're right on schedule, Phil, that's all. You're a perfectly, rapateta, blah-blah-blah modern statistic. …”

If words lack sincerity, they also function as weapons—artillery fire in the combat zone that Eddie and Mickey's house (and by extension all contemporary society) has become. In one of the most revealing stage directions in Hurlyburly, Rabe indicates that when Bonnie yells at Eddie, “he winces, as if her words are physical.” Words—their intent and the way they are delivered—become destructive forces. Accordingly when Artie tries to defend himself, he responds as if “his words are light little chunks of fury.” Darlene's name is “like a punch from which Mickey reels.” And when Mickey scoffs at Darlene's sexual accomplishments, his “remark nearly catapults Eddie across the room.”

This view of words as combative weapons appropriately explains the verbal blitzkrieg heard on stage. Yelps, screams, shouts, cries, moans, and fiery threats supply the verbal hurlyburly, the sound signifying fury. As Donna remarks, “Nobody ever agrees with me, people just scream at me.” Given the design of the set, characters repeatedly shout to each other when one is downstairs in the living room and the other is in the bedroom or bathroom upstairs. Mickey has to yell over the volume of the television set. Phil constantly speaks with his volume turned up. What is especially distressing—and symptomatic of the characters' lack of self-awareness—is that often they do not even know they are screaming. When Eddie, for example, elaborates in high pitch about restaurants and boyfriends, Darlene asks “Are you aware that you're yelling?”

The inability of Rabe's characters to communicate is further stressed in the repeated stage business involving telephone conversations. A conventional object, the phone is used to thwart an audience's expectations that rational conversation is possible. The phone becomes an instrument of frustration, anger, and later despair. Discussing what a phone call means from Eddie's former wife Agnes, Mickey expresses in characteristically vulgar terms the dangers of ever talking on the phone: “I mean, you might as well put your balls in her teeth as pick up the phone.” When Agnes does call Eddie, she makes sure that no communication between them will take place. For she phones him only when he is drunk and unable to utter anything except obscenities. Objecting to his language, Agnes is told by her ex-husband, “Every call you make to me is obscene.” Faced with an “emergency situation”—finding a whore for Phil—Eddie has difficulty reaching Bonnie on the phone and, therefore, takes his anger out by “furiously dialing” and then slamming the phone down. Later, Eddie quarrels with Darlene over her indecision about where to eat. Determined to make a choice anyway, he “grabs up the phone and yells into it” while manhandling Darlene at the same time. However, as Eddie picks up the phone he receives an answer he did not expect or want. The voice on the other end tells him that Phil is dead. An absurd messenger of destiny, the phone call throws Eddie into paroxysms of doubt.

Unquestionably, the biggest phone junkie is Artie. Always worried about receiving or sending messages to advance his career, he frequently uses the phone to shape his own image as an important Hollywood mogul. Yet the phone becomes a means of his undoing. After hearing of Artie's impending deal with a big producer, Eddie decides to phone the producer to recommend his friend Artie. As he starts dialing, Eddie learns that the producer is Herb Simon, a well known liar and snake. Unwilling to dignify Artie's choice of employer, Eddie bangs the phone down, refusing to communicate on Artie's behalf, thus undercutting his friend's self-importance.

The way Rabe's characters dress also shows that their lives are in shambles. Many of them are described as messes, reflecting their drug-controlled behavior and the inner turmoil behind it. Appropriately enough, the play opens with Eddie asleep on his couch, stoned from the previous night's binge. He is “a mess, his shirt out, wrinkled, unbuttoned, his trousers remaining on him only because one leg is yet tangled around the ankle.” This slovenly tableau prepares the audience for the way other characters will appear. Mickey often gets up, goes out, or gets ready for bed looking unkempt and dissolute. Violent tempered Phil frequently shows up “disheveled,” shirtless and hair tusseled, a fitting picture of physical fury. A victim of that fury, Bonnie appears with “clothing ripped and dirty” after Phil throws her out of her own car. In retaliation, she rips off her pantyhose and throws her torn clothing at Eddie, Phil's defender. Bonnie's actions become almost an angry rendition of her striptease show. Donna, the sexual care package dropped off by Artie, wears “tight shrunken clothes” and “shriveled jeans,” “buckskin jacket, and beat-up cowboy boots” to earmark her as a 1980s punker in search of a fix and a bed. When she returns to Eddie's house in Act Three after being thrown out earlier by Phil, “her clothing [is] in disarray, and tattered, her makeup old and smeared.” She returns wearing “patches” over her clothing. These patches, supposedly gathered in her travels, suggest the bits and pieces into which her life has been fragmented. Ironically, Donna covers herself and Eddie with the tattered coat as she snuggles next to him as the play closes. The coat objectifies the dirty, patched up relationships both characters can expect to have.

Only slick and sleazy Artie appears carefully groomed, a sign of his consummate interest in himself as a macho sex partner. As elsewhere in Hurlyburly, though, Artie is undercut by the way he is dressed. In the Broadway production, he is “a frazzled amalgam of vulgarity and wounded vanity—loonily outfitted (by Ann Roth) in Western gear.”⁹

Two interesting scenes involving clothing—resembling frames from David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago—further emphasize how costume reveals the physical and spiritual decay of this Hollywood set. Shortly after Artie brings Donna to the house, Mickey attempts to undress her in front of everyone, “His hand moving to unbuckle her shorts.” For him she is an object, to be abused, undressed for his own pleasure. There is no love, only lust in action. In a parallel scene, in Act One, Scene Two, Eddie and Darlene undress each other as part of their sexual “negotiations,” but only after each promises the other a minimum of emotional involvement in the relationship. These two “undressing” scenes emphasize that sex is tawdry and temporary when separated from affection and commitment.

Rabe's stage business graphically pinpoints the effects of the frazzled lives his characters lead. The way in which they move, interact, and gesture point to the disorder within their souls. They move in anxious animation reflecting “lives of noisy dissipation, disputes, and disarray,” as John Beaufort put it.¹⁰ Interestingly enough, the play was originally entitled Spin off.¹¹ Rabe's explicit stage directions document the frenetic movement of uncertainty and hostility. Given these careful stage blueprints, it is no wonder that Jack Kroll observed that “Mike Nichols's staging has never had more electricity.”¹²

None of Rabe's characters do anything in an orderly, calm, or rational fashion. They move in fits and starts, exaggeratedly, anxiously, aggressively. The noise within them is bruited without. They slam and bang doors, stomp up and down stairs, charge past each other, rush into each other, or jump and leap after each other. They “bolt” and wobble across stage intoxicated by booze or dope or both. Their fuming anger is frequently released in furious gestures. They pound pillows, hit television sets, back each other into corners, butt heads, “spin off into a squabble with each other,” throw things, and even pour their liquor “furiously.” They accost every object in sight, including each other, often menacingly, sometimes playfully.

Among the two most frequent types of action specified in Rabe's stage directions are whirling and pacing, complementary movements of anger and frustration, the one emotion leading to and then back to the other. When they whirl (a frequently used verb in Rabe's canon), his characters become like dervishes without benefit of holy inspiration. They frenetically move in circles without having a larger purpose in mind, or any reason for a meaningful completion of their furious spin. “Whirling at the base of the stairs to face Mickey,” Eddie makes it clear he does not want his housemate to see Darlene. In turn, Mickey does his “Whirling toward” Darlene when, breaking their short-lived love affair, he observes “Everything went so fast.” Eddie is also guilty of “whirling” in his battle with Darlene and shortly before he “flops furiously back on his pillow.” In a frenzy, Phil “whirls to face” Donna in a confrontation that leads to her eviction from the bachelor pad.

When they are not spinning in fury, the coke generation pace in frustration, a gesture symbolizing their hopelessness. In explaining the fight he has just had with his wife, Phil grows “Agitated, starting to pace away from Eddie;” likewise, in listening to Phil, Eddie “paces in a meditative, investigative manner.” These complementary pieces of stage business might suggest that the men are thinking things out but show only how foolishly trapped they are in their own solipsistic world. The conclusion they reach after pacing is that Phil's wife is more to blame than he is for hurting his hand on her teeth when he struck her. Confronted with Eddie's inquiry into her whereabouts the night before, Darlene resorts to “pacing away from him” both to escape and to vent her frustration. As Darlene's gesture indicates, when characters cannot understand what is happening in their lives they go into a pacing routine. Similarly, Mickey paces when Eddie flips through a dictionary to find the answer about Phil's death and destiny. Pacing thus represents the characters' helplessness, their attempt to evade an unpleasantness, or escape an answer. But escape for them is impossible; they only repeat their steps and the mistakes of their lives.

In the Hurlyburly world, objects assume greater importance than people. From the start Rabe emphasizes how things overshadow individuals, even to the point of pushing them out of the picture. Inside Eddie and Mickey's house, clutter is everywhere. On stage we see “piles of newspapers and magazines,” “books, photos, resumes,” and dirty glasses and dishes. Outside, the house is “completely surrounded by wild vegetation” threatening to take over the drug-cult occupants. These and other Hollywood props are part of the clutter in the characters' lives and at times become inseparable from them, thus reducing these individuals to objects themselves. Ordinary objects in Hurlyburly are transformed into gnawing symbols of the characters' quest for security, identity, or a reason for existence itself.

In “what may be the best bimbo part ever written,”¹³ Donna lives in her own world where relationships neither count nor last. She appears with Walkman headphones and Willie Nelson records bearing such ironic titles as “All of Me” (which is what Artie and his greedy friends demand of her) and “Someone to Watch Over Me” (something impossible in a society where human values matter so little). Donna's possessions—her props of identity—speak movingly about her plastic world of escape, about her need for security. Although she tries to tune out the Hollywood world, she is inescapably caught in its hurlyburly. As the props associated with her indicate, Darlene, the photojournalist, does try to succeed in such a world. She carries a camera case and assorted photography equipment underscoring her commitment to image making. Such objects are her security blanket. At one point, she “roots around” in her case to learn about Eddie's fascination with uncertainty. Like other creative types, Darlene searches for an answer by using the props that create and sustain Hollywood images. But neither her work nor her relationships lead to a satisfying life.

Mickey, another Hollywood image creator, overloads himself with the props of power and identity. He carries handfuls of resumes of the individuals whom he is considering for parts in productions, voraciously reads Variety, the bible of Hollywood image worshippers, and escapes into the pages of TV Guide when pushed into a confrontation with Eddie over Phil's death. These props are, of course, appropriate for a casting director consumed with finding the right image—the right facade to conceal a disturbing reality. But like Darlene, Mickey is so engulfed by these objects that he finds little time for human commitment or sympathy.

The watch is Artie's prop, for he is the play's—and the age's—timekeeper. Numerous stage directions have him look at and fumble with his watch emphasizing his obsession with time and the success he thinks it will bring him. The watch becomes a telling symbol for the frenzied times in which these Hollywood hustlers live. Time should be logical, progressive, a chronicle of human sentiment and achievement, but for Artie (and others) there is little emotional worth or rational significance in timekeeping or message recording. Time for the Hollywood set is a barrage of opportunities stinging them to death. It is a chaotic engagement with an uncertain destiny, a way to remind individuals like Phil that he is losing what he loves and Artie that he has appointments with Hollywood sharks.

Rabe bluntly characterizes the hulk Phil by some crucial props at the beginning of Act One, Scene Three. He enters carrying “two six-packs of beer and a grocery bag containing meat and bread for sandwiches and two huge bags of popcorn.” The objects of Phil's quest—meat and beer—quickly identify him as a creature of appetite. Moreover, the way Phil carts them on stage shows that he, like Mickey and his resumes, is overwhelmed by objects. To illustrate his kinship with Phil, Eddie appears on stage a few minutes later also weighted down with objects. He carries “a bag of pretzels and clothes from the cleaner,” his particular symbols of clutter. A few minutes later still, “Eddie comes out of his bedroom, a bunch of clothes in his hands.”

The props found late in the play cruelly emphasize Rabe's twin themes of desperation and dehumanization. In Act Three, Eddie and Bonnie argue about Phil. High on liquor and drugs, Eddie delivers his infamous pronouncement that it is better to be a thing than a human being—“I will be a thing and loved; a thing and live.” In the process, he lies on the floor with his “nest” of pillows, “clutching his garbage can and his bottle.” Trying to escape Bonnie's questions and fury, Eddie begins “crawling and dragging with him his bottle, his garbage can, and his pillow.” Visual and verbal elements create a Rabean emblem of the comic horrors of Eddie's life. The props—liquor bottle, pillows, and garbage can—accentuate Eddie's world of escape and eventual dissipation. According to his creed, individuals must become hard, unfeeling objects to survive. But that survival leads to a dead end. Reading the message behind these props, an audience learns that Hollywood values reduce an individual to a piece of garbage. The image of the garbage can hugging Eddie parallels the fetal position he assumed at the start of the play. Both actions teach that there can be no return to the womb, only a degenerate journey to the tomb via a garbage can.

Another example of the reduction of human beings to nothingness occurs in the last scene when Phil's friends return “In the dark” from his funeral. Caustic Mickey observes that “life isn't for everyone” and the accompanying prop emphasizes his message: he empties the ash tray. Phil's life, like cigarette ashes, will be thrown away; both are perishable, negligible. Using the ash tray, Rabe provides an ironic twist on the Ash Wednesday admonition: “Remember, man, thou art dust and into dust thou shalt return.” But these Hollywoodites will never rise from the ashes of suffering into a redeemed world.

The last and perhaps most important Hollywood prop is a dictionary that Eddie uses to decode the suicide note that Phil mailed before his death. (The dictionary carries the same thematic significance as the streamer in Rabe's earlier play.) That note—“‘The guy who dies in an accident understands the nature of destiny’”—prompts Eddie to believe that Phil understood the meaning of his own death. To prove to the cynical Mickey that Phil was clairvoyant and to find causality for his own existence, Eddie dives into a dictionary to look up the meaning of such key words as accident and destiny. The dictionary becomes an extension of Eddie during much of the last scene—he carries it with him, busily turns its pages, bows over it, and even props himself up seated on the floor with the dictionary in front of him. Ultimately, though, he neither convinces Mickey of Phil's powers nor arrives at a satisfying sense of self-awareness.

Noting the importance of the prop, Clive Barnes conjectured that Hurlyburly is “the first play to make a dictionary its hero.”¹⁴ It might be more appropriate, however, to alter Barnes's observation and say that Hurlyburly is the first play to make a dictionary its anti-hero. Such a view is more consistent with the Hollywood experience Rabe presents. The dictionary symbolizes many of the negatives elevated to a position of importance in America today. It is not a source for seminal answers and it hardly qualifies as, or substitutes for, the “archives” of self that Eddie tells Mickey to consult to determine the meaning of a life or a relationship. Using a banal dictionary, Eddie demonstrates once again his characteristically shallow approach to existence. Moreover, throughout Hurlyburly Rabe has, as we have seen, emphasized the powerlessness of words, the futility of communication. In this regard, it is bitterly troubling to see, in the last moments of the play, Eddie groping for meaning in a book whose contents he and his friends have debased or turned into savage weapons.

Unquestionably, Hurlyburly offers a bleak parable for the 1980s. Given the year of its production, the play ironically shows how history 1984-style comes true. Many dire Orwellian predictions are fulfilled in Rabe's America. Through his provocative dramaturgy, Rabe portrays a Hollywood cocaine culture symbolizing contemporary American society caught in the hurlyburly of dehumanization and despair. In such a society language loses significance and sincerity as characters shout at each other, unwilling or unable to sustain self-revealing communication. The sounds of their fury turn words into weapons, messages into missiles. Their appearance uncovers the ravages of their life style and life choices. Their clothes are tattered, disheveled, or ripped from their bodies. Like their words and their appearance, the characters' movements and gestures are chaotic; they bolt, whirl, and pace in anger, frustration, and drug-induced frenzy. Finally, Rabe's message about such an existence is conveyed through a series of carefully chosen Hollywood props—stage emblems of despair—scattered among the clutter in Eddie and Mickey's house. Hurlyburly is truly a horror play for our age.

Notes

1. Jack Kroll, “Hollywood Wasteland,” Newsweek, July 2, 1984, p. 238. This and subsequent page numbers to New York reviews of Hurlyburly refer to the page numbers in the New York Theatre Critics Reviews.

2. Frank Rich, “Theatre: Hurlyburly,” New York Times, June 22, 1984, p. 234.

3. Robert Brustein, “Painless Destiny,” New Republic, August 6, 1984, pp. 27-29.

4. Clive Barnes, “Rabe's Hurlyburly Pins Hollywood to the Wall,” New York Post, June 22, 1984, p. 236.

5. Gerald Weales, “American Theatre Watch,” Georgia Review 39 (Fall 1985): 620-621.

6. Hurlyburly: A Play by David Rabe (New York: Grove Press, 1985), p. 95.

7. Richard Schickel, “Failing Words,” Time, July 2, 1984, p. 239.

8. See, for example, Schickel (“his subject is language”) and Douglas Watt, “Hurlyburly: A Vicious View of Hollywood,” New York Daily News, June 22, 1984, p. 235.

9. Quoted in Rich, p. 234.

10. John Beaufort, “Hurlyburly is Confused Comedy,” The Christian Science Monitor, July 3, 1984, p. 237.

11. Quoted in Brustein, p. 27.

12. Kroll, p. 238.

13. Kroll, p. 238.

14. Barnes, p. 236.