Playwright's Progress

...But it is not a typical setup...

...Now we have the third panel of the Vietnam triptych, Streamers...

...What Rabe has written is a play where the realistic and symbolic are beginning to coalesce plausibly...

...Like O'Neill, Rabe realized that his strong, naturalistic subject matter needed some kind of poetic heightening...

...Whether Richie really believes Billy to be secretly attracted to him, and whether Billy does, in fact, have such a latent response are only two of the interesting questions raised but inadequately dealt with...

...But, Streamers is saying among other things, the war is with us at home, too: Its causes are to be found as readily in native American—or human—frictions, neuroses, social injustices in a typical Army barracks as anywhere else...

...Nevertheless, as brilliantly directed by Mike Nichols and superbly acted by a true ensemble headed by Paul Rudd (since replaced by Mark Metcalf), Terry Alexander, Peter Evans, Dorian Harewood, Kenneth McMillan and Dolph Sweet, Streamers is an achievement of consequence...

...The second was In the Boom Boom Room, and it is to Papp's credit that, after it failed at the uptown Vivian Beaumont, he put it on again, in a revised version, downtown at the Public Theater...

...and Richie, an overindulged bourgeois kid who, having gone homosexual, enlisted either to combat or to indulge his homosexuality—he himself isn't sure...

...Rabe came to the fore with two plays about Vietnam that Joe Papp had the good sense to produce back to back...

...Billy, scandalized, demands that the act take place in the bushes, not in what he considers, at least partly, his home...

...Rabe's originality in these early works consisted of intensely poetic monologues sometimes given to characters who had not earned them (like the father in Sticks and Bones), and of imaginary characters who were real enough to the protagonists of the respective plays, but invisible and inaudible to the rest...

...flights of heightened diction had to be assimilated and justified by creating dramatis per-sonae who were disturbed, odd and imaginative enough to convince us that they are inhabitants of both their mundane urban setting and a darker, more phantasmagoric realm of their haunted psychological landscape...

...Unfortunately, the revisions were minimal, and this story of how an unhappy childhood and bad filial and sexual relations drive a young woman into becoming first a go-go girl in Philadelphia, and then, worse yet, a topless dancer in New York (a fate, apparently, only just better than death), remained sprawling, rambling, overambitious, and underdeveloped...

...Yet there was in this unsatisfactory play a significant step in what, to me, is the right direction: Rabe seemed to have discovered that the poetic and symbolic elements of his realistic tale had to be worked into its everyday fabric more intimately and persuasively...

...The trio of friends consists of the above-mentioned Billy, a former college athlete who has studiously trained himself to become ungrammatical and folksy...

...actually, the first, since it deals with soldiers on the eve of their probable embarkation for the theater of war...

...Roger, though greatly displeased, is willing to avert his eyes...

...The play's title, though, derives from the subplot, one of whose main characters also inadvertently gets killed...

...Several critics, myself included, made tentative comparisons between Rabe and O'Neill: As praise, this may have been somewhat premature...

...If this sounds hopeless in bald summary, it was infinitely more unconvincing and tedious in dramatic—or, rather, undramatic—elaboration: neither Rabe's Oresteia nor his "Man-soniad" succeeded individually...

...Still, the intention, the new direction, was, I think, salutary...

...This was, to pursue our initial parallel, Rabe's Anna Christie and Hairy Ape phase, which he managed no more successfully than O'Neill...

...But there is another master image, too: A Viet Cong sniper, whom Cokes trapped in his "spider hole" by dropping a grenade into his hideout and then sitting on its steel lid, while the fellow inside could be heard scrabbling like a demented Charlie Chaplin until he blew up...

...thrown together, they clashed and fell apart...

...Perhaps the crucial line of the play is a remark by Billy, the all-American boy: "I mean, Wisconsin's a funny place...

...We don't know who we are, and so it is goodnight to all of us...

...There is a violent clash, bloodshed and tragedy...

...Symbols could not be mere imaginary, and thus marginal, characters...

...The play ends with a sad, tipsy, doomed Cokes, about to fall asleep and unaware that his buddy was the victim of a freak murder, singing the Streamer song in mock-Vietnamese, as the trapped man might have sung it...

...He alternately hides it and flaunts it...

...But Cokes is on death's threshold, and this has belatedly opened him up to some kind of idiot curiosity about life, even compassion...

...Rooney, a sergeant, spent two wars in the paratroops with Sergeant Cokes, a buddy who has just been shipped stateside from Vietnam because he has leukemia...

...Roger, a black man who, depending on how you look at it, has become acclimatized or an Uncle Tom, and is perfectly content in the white man's Army...

...its heroine and the people around her did not engage us sufficiently to justify all the fuss...

...It is, to be sure, desperately hard to supply stage folk with such a dual citizenship, and a character like Ral-phie, the maniacal, fantasy-mon-gering truck driver, was fundamentally unbelievable...

...This only slightly unbalanced apple cart is totally upset by the arrival of Carlyle, a disturbed and menacing ghetto black without specialization, who keeps dropping in on Roger, one of the few Negroes in the camp, and one from whom he expects sympathy...

...That, by the way, is how I heard it...

...All those clear-eyed people sayin' 'Hello' and lookin' you straight in the eye...

...Both plays were forceful and, despite covering wellknown ground, remarkably original —although some of the trouble with them hinged precisely on their originality...

...The song these two are given to drunkenly singing is a paratrooper's version of "Beautiful Dreamer": "Beautiful Streamer, Open for me "It is the anthem to the parachute, supposedly sung especially by those whose chutes do not open as they plummet to certain death...

...I don't know who I was...

...Instead, however, Rabe gave us next two lights that failed...

...There was to be one more play to round out a promised Vietnam trilogy...

...The play is an attempt at multum in parvo, of making a little say much...

...Rooney and Cokes are a ludicrous and frightening pair of fatsos: a gross Tweedledee and Tweedledum, always boozing, blustering, brawling...

...Rooney is unreconstructed...

...again like O'Neill, he was most deficient in his language—particularly in his use of symbols, which the nonnaturalist playwright needs no less than words...

...But there is not quite enough of the little, and then, suddenly, a bit too much much...

...The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel dealt with the pre-Vietnam life and Vietnam death of a typical American nonentity...

...The script is still changing...

...The first was The Orphan, an endeavor to find parallels between the fall of the House of Atreus and Charles Manson as a representative of present-day America...

...three GIs, being specialists (we are not told in what), have a relatively cozy three-bed room to themselves...

...We are in an Army barracks in Virginia, in 1965...

...In short, I would prefer a little more incident before the final bloodletting, and a somewhat clearer sense of direction and development...

...Night...

...No, no,' Cokes dreamily replies...

...as descriptions of certain difficulties, it was entirely correct...

...Even the more central figures had a way of veering either into excessive ordinariness or into overhallucinated caricature...

...There is still more symbolism than strictly necessary (a rather supererogatory multiple car crash, for instance), and certain characters are insufficiently fleshed out...

...Roger wonders: "Sergeant...

...On Stage PLAYWRIGHT'S PROGRESS by john simon lf one had to pick the young playwright of our time most likely to succeed—now that the Shepards, Guares, Horovitzes, McNallys and the rest who looked good seem to have reached, at best, a plateau, at worst, stagnation—one would have to bet on David Rabe...

...His latest play, Streamers, is more a matter of consolidation than advancement, and has its share of imperfections...

...And, after a pause: "No...

...And then all of a sudden the whole neighborhood goes mad...

...Everybody's good, you think, and happy, and honest...

...it managed to remain clotted and far too private for such a public medium as the stage...

...in a mimeographed script I obtained, I read: "And then there's all of a sudden a neighbor who goes mad as a hatter...

...What happens, in a nutshell, is that Richie, whose increasingly overt advances to Billy are ever more indignantly rejected, tauntingly starts to put the make on Carlyle, who, out of hatred for the Army and whitey, and no aversion to getting a little oral sex, agrees...

...his buddies, meanwhile, refuse to believe that he means "that fag stuff...

...This, then, is one master image: We hang on by a single thread that, because of some foolish mistake of ours or mere accidental malfunction, lets us down—ungently—to our deaths...

...Sticks and Bones concerned the return of a blinded yet morally awakened veteran to his uncomprehending middle-American family...

...Laudable as his efforts were, Rabe could not quite carry them off—least of all the poetic diction...

...Maybe you was Charlie Chaplin too...

...But there is a mind at work in it, alive to problems of the world and the craft alike, and the greater fusion of these easily compensates for a certain lack of raw power and a wider horizon...

...Rabe's career has progressed unevenly, yet even his failures have been attempts at branching out, at artistic growth...