Themes: All Themes
Themes: Alienation and Loneliness
A major focus of Streamers is the impact that the army—and war—has on men, its disruptive influence on their lives. Some, like Billy and Roger, are able to make the adjustment, but others, like Martin, and especially Carlyle, cannot.
In Carlyle’s case the results are devastating. He is a black man with an angry social consciousness; he feels like an outcast in a world dominated by white authority. When first introduced, he is on a mission to...
(Read more)Themes: Anger and Hatred
Anger is most evident in the complex makeup of Carlyle. It is a non-specific rage that lies close to the surface of his character, ready to erupt at any moment no matter how slight the provocation. His is an impersonal anger, however. He does not target characters as intended victims, making his actions in the course of play seem both arbitrary and almost gratuitous.
Carlyle can not funnel his anger at the impersonal, all powerful bureaucracy of...
(Read more)Themes: Culture Clash
The diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds of the characters are an essential source of the tension among the soldiers in Streamers. The military requires a period of adjustment to its culture, a closed society that neither recognizes nor rewards diversity. Instead, it attempts to impose order, discipline, and a sense of duty that for many of the recruits involves a regimen either too rigorous or too demanding. One of them, Billy, seems to make...
(Read more)Themes: Death
The murders of both Billy and Rooney seem gratuitous, almost, in fact, pointless. Their deaths are the result of Carlyle’s inability to adjust to his situation, one that threatens his fragile identity. In the aftermath of their murders, Carlyle reveals a stupefying immaturity in his apparent belief that army life is some sort of game from which he can somehow walk away when it threatens or no longer amuses him. He simply does not seem to...
(Read more)Themes: Duty and Responsibility
Military order and discipline have always demanded a sense of duty and responsibility from soldiers, even those enrolled in the ranks through conscription rather than voluntary service. Part of basic training involves inculcating that sense into draftees and recruits, but such indoctrination is not always successful. The army attempts to winnow out those who can not make an adequate adjustment, recruits like Martin, who is discharged after his...
(Read more)Themes: Friendship
Roger and Billy are the two characters best able to adjust to army life and accept its rigorous demands of good order and discipline. In fact, they approach an ideal in that both are able to think critically but also accept a sense of duty that requires a submerging of their individualism under the surface of military homogeneity. They are not, in short, mindless and robotic recruits, not mere canon fodder. They are also good friends, quietly...
(Read more)Themes: Identity
Streamersis a play about a crisis of identity in the lives of its major characters. Each, willingly or not, is attempting to adjust to life in the army. Adapting to it requires a sacrifice of some part of self that new soldiers like Martin and Carlyle are unable to make. Roger and Billy have succeeded, however, even Richie, though in his case the situation involves a sort of ‘‘outing.’’ He flaunts his homosexuality, not because he wants to escape...
(Read more)Themes: Race and Racism
As Rabe demonstrates, the army by the time of the Vietnam War had largely become color blind....
(This entire section contains 1280 words.)
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In fact, it was much more of a melting pot than society at large, in which, despite such civil rights advances as the desegregation of public schools and the market place, people could and did chose to remain socially segregated. The new demands placed on Carlyle are simply too much. He harbors deep resentments towards whites, which, though certainly in...
(Read more)Themes: Sex
Part of the intensity of Streamersarises from sexual needs. Richie’s homosexual desires are directed towards Billy, who grows increasingly angry over Richie’s overt flirtations, perhaps because Billy really is not all that secure about his sexual identity. In his disclosure to Roger, he reveals that at one point in his life he had considered becoming a priest, which argues that he was willing to adopt celibacy. In any case, Richie’s flirtations...
(Read more)Themes: Violence and Cruelty
Violence is endemic in Streamers. It principally takes the form of Carlyle’s violent reactions, his brutal knifings of Billy and Sergeant Rooney. His actions verge on the inexplicable, which makes them doubly distressing. Carlyle seems to act almost like a cornered animal, enraged and extremely dangerous and unpredictable. Neither Billy nor Rooney does anything to warrant Carlyle’s violent responses. On the other hand, Carlyle does not seem to be...
(Read more)Themes: War and Peace
War lies in the background of Streamers, functioning as a kind of catalyst that ups the emotional ante of the play. That the young soldiers may be facing a one-way trip to a distant, Asian ‘‘Disneyland’’ preys on their minds. It is a fact that contributes to the emotional instability of all of them, especially Carlyle, who has a sense of being used by white men to fight in a war in which he has nothing at stake.
The Vietnam War plays no...
(Read more)Themes: Human Imperfection and Conflict
Despite its shocking subject matter—homosexuality, racism, and murder in a military installation—Streamersis clearly about larger human concerns. The subjects of racism and homosexuality allow playwright David Rabe to examine realistically human imperfection and sources of inner and overt conflict. In one sense, the barracks horror is a microcosm for the larger battlefield, specifically the Vietnam War, which hovers over this American scene...
(Read more)Themes: Violence and Moral Decay
Violence, moral laxity, and intolerance are simply the soldiers’ responses to a threatening situation and confusion about their fate, what roles they are expected to play, and why they are in this situation. The two boozy sergeants can be seen as the traditional military’s corruption of values: They are alcoholic, self-indulgent, amoral breakers of rules, and they are, or at least were in the past, killers. Cokes’s tired acceptance of war,...
(Read more)Themes: Acceptance and Resolution
That this image of war-making ardor and professionalism can emerge worn but accepting, is—at least in the dramatic emotional effect of the ending—reassuring. Perhaps he is merely evading a comprehension of human conditions which should inspire despair, but of all the characters in the play, he is the most direct and honest in his response. It is, notably, his response that concludes the play.
(Read more)Themes: Role of Carlyle
Perhaps too much has been made of the role of Carlyle as evil exploiter of the weaknesses of the other men. He does taunt the other soldiers. Surly and morose and potentially vicious though he may be, however, Carlyle is not malevolent. He is frightened about being sent to Vietnam, insecure in his role as black man in a white man’s army, and wary of others’ response to him, and he feels persecuted because he is still assigned to a unit of...
(Read more)Themes: Human Fear and Misunderstanding
In dramatic terms, Streamersis about human fear, weakness, and misunderstanding. Thematically, it is about evasions of moral responsibility, the limits of tolerance, sexual role-playing, and—in a limited sense—the war in Vietnam. Symbolically, it presents the military as a microcosm of all society; its viewpoint, though realistically seen in the confines of a single room of a military installation, is clearly more encompassing in suggestion. It...
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