Air-Conditioned Hell

By T.E.K.

The bloody war in Viet Nam actively festers in the imagination of one of the more promising young U.S. playwrights, David Rabe. In his drama of last season, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, the taste of blood and the apprehension of imminent death gave the evening an elastic tension. His offering last week, Sticks and Bones, presented at Joseph Papp's Public Theater (TIME, Nov. 15), might be a sequel to Pavlo Hummel. The hero has returned from Viet Nam not dead but blind, a walking corpse in some perpetual nighttime of the soul. There is blood again, but it is a kind of insane red laughter gurgling in the throat.

David (David Selby) has come home to a double death. Sightless he suddenly sees the members of his family for what they are, characters out of an adman's superdreams, puppets dangling from dentifrices, automobiles and cellophane, living on packaged illusions and self-destructive myths. They are hypocrites and moles. They are also a sad-funny, surreal-absurdist clan, whose like has not been seen on the U.S. stage since Edward Albee's The American Dream. The father is named Ozzie and the mother Harriet, which is a clue to the lowest level of the playwright's satiric intent and achievement.

Vampire Bat. Ozzie, played with translucent poignancy by Tom Aldredge, is tortured by lost youth, lost potency, lost possibilities. He cries out for a past when he wore no straitjacket: "I was nobody's goddam father. I was nobody's goddam husband, and I could run--nobody could run the way I could run--run for the sun." That is pain distilled into compassion, a special gift of David Rabe's, Harriet (Elizabeth Wilson) is one of those mothers who likes to think that she only "lives for others"--as selflessly as a vampire bat. David's younger brother Rick (Cliff DeYoung) pops in and out of the house with a vacuous "Hi Mom, hi Dad; bye Mom, bye Dad" that might be a recorded announcement. At the still center of this air-conditioned hell stands David, graver than a Greek chorus in his comments, with the memory-made-visible of the Vietnamese girl (Asa Gim) he had once loved. She glides through the rooms or sits in mute beauty, the specter of guilt.

While the territory he traverses is not new, Rabe strides across it with such intensity that the playgoer is raptly involved. What Sticks and Bones lacks is size and scope. Rabe is good enough so that he ought to ponder what makes a dramatist an enduring force rather than simply a Geiger counter of his times. The Greeks and the Elizabethans, who deemed men valiant heroes as great as their doom, produced awesome drama. It is the current American fashion to see men as brain-bleached automatons, and our drama has shrunk to precisely those mean, narrow and dispiriting dimensions.

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