THE STAGE

...In the few roiniues before be is stabbed, Billy, forced by anger, biate oj4 of his role and becomes an example as well as, a victim pf the killing possibilities in an uncontrolled Set in 1965, on an Army base in Virginia, Streamers is the tbird-Rabe says the last-of his Vietnam plays...

...It was like an old comedy, he says, with Charlie Chaplin as the man in the hole, but he didn't know who he was...

...The production of the Rabe play, The Crossing, Was pretty bad, I'm afraid, and the play itself is a weak one, peopled by stereotypes that Rabe, who kept rewriting, never learned to enliven...

...GERALD WHALESLD WHALES...

...His apparent conviction that tins is the worst of all possible worlds-his tragic sense of life, to give it a more elegant formulation-no longer seems gratuitous, as it did in The Crossing, where Rabe might as easily have chosen an ending from Column A as one from Column B. The bloody end of Streamers- like the destruction of Pavlo Hummel, the suicide of the blind veteran in Sticks and Bones, the degradation of the heroine of In the Boom Boom Room-is implicit from the beginning of the play...

...The third soldier in the room (Cariyle is an outsider) is another black whose sohition to all problems is to turn away, to busy himself with cleaning the barracks, playing ball, hiding big eyes, but his refusal to be involved cad no more, stop the destruction than can Billy's business-minding...

...Still, it is interesting to anyone who has followed Rabe's career, for even as a student playwright he had already come to the dark sense of things that informs all his work...

...This is clear in die at first amiable sense of misunderstanding among the three soldiers in whose barracks room the play takes place, in the roles they assume or have thrust upon them, in an escalation of violent images, both dramatic and verbal...

...The listening soldier suggests that be, too, may have been Charlie Chaplin...

...As in Ronald Ribman's Harry, Noon and Night, with its failure down and its Dachau circus, Streamers offers a world of clown killers and clpwn victims in which, eventually, everyone's parachute refuses to open...

...In the final, very moving scene of the play, Sgt...

...Coker, who does not know that his old buddy has been killed, tells again the story of how he rolled a grenade into a hole and sat on the metal lid while the enemy soldier inside tried to get out before it exploded...

...The manipulative hand of the playwright can be seen occasionally (did all three soldiers have to have childhood memories of loss or madness or death...

...To see Streamers simply as BUJje's play would be to suggest that a different course action, different kind of understanding might let the haro, the play, the audience escape violence...

...et-sinart black but is in fact a psychopath, aa ejatwdimeat of irrationality, and Billy dies, still half-aypied that things have got out of hand...

...It jbyipu that Billy's interfering impulses, his failure to understand Richie or Cariyle, the violence hidden in his angry innocence provide a workable analogy for the Ampiican presence in Southeast Asia, but Rabe clearly does not intend that his play should have a narrowly political reference...

...The central figure in Streamers is Billy, another naive Rabe hero who seems much younger than the twenty-four years he is supposed to be...

...A fresh-faced mid-westerner who imagines he has moved beyond the cheerful surface of Wisconsin manners to the complexity of life beneath, he still steps into each situation, imagining that rationality, straight-talk, cards-on-the-table will clarify tilings, make everything all right He becomes increasingly distressed as Richie, who is gay, insists on disbelieving everything Billy says, taking his denials of homosexuality as masked confessions, invitations...

...The audience never learns whether or not Billy is self-deluding and it is not important because Streamers is not a sexual melodrama but a play about a world in which words-true or false, sincere or not-will not save you...

...In the almost fifteen years since The Crossing Was first written, Rabe has learned to handle his stereotypes dramatically, to turn them into compelling theatrical grotesques-like the two old sergeants, rotes which let Kenneth McMillan and Dolph Sweet walk off with Streamers -or so to enmesh them in the plot and theme of his play that their functional importance tends to mask what is familiar about them...

...but not so obviously as in the earlier plays...

...This may be because Streamers is the most realistic of the Rabe plays, almost free of the non-realistic devices of the earlier works which in effect invited the playwright on stage...

...THE STAGE The Philadelphia Company, an ambitious young organization with its location in its title, recently staged two one-act plays, early works by David Rabe and Leslie Lee,' who, since they studied at Villanova, are considered Philadelphia local boys who made good...

...That will not work...

...The Crossing is a conventional initiation play in which a young Wisconsin boy (perhaps Billy of Streamers eight years younger) comes to Chicago to find freedom and discovers violence, feat, pain...