War Without End

By T.E.Kalem

STREAMERS

by DAVID RABE

In outward form, David Rabe's trilogy of military plays, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, and now Streamers, appears to be about the brutalizing effect of army life and the scourge of Viet Nam on the U.S. conscience. In inner content, they are more like detonations of the individual psyche --a simple soul goes berserk.

That is what happens to Carlyle (Dorian Harewood) in Streamers. The locale is a Virginia army camp in 1965. Carlyle is black, and he has been assigned to a company of "untouchables," i.e., men on perpetual KP and other menial duties. He is desperately afraid that he will be shipped off to Viet Nam.

As an outcast in search of attention, affection and "a home," as he puts it, he begins frequenting the quarters of three technical sergeants, two white, one black. They are men of caste status in an army hutment, an odd lot indeed. Richie (Peter Evans) is an avowed homosexual. The college-bred Billy (Paul Rudd) may be a latent homosexual, but won't admit it. And Roger is a black who has bridged the racial gap through competence and an equable temper.

The action proceeds mainly as a kind of extended barracks-room bull session. But eventually, sexual desire between Richie and Carlyle triggers a racist diatribe from Billy. Suddenly Carlyle flips out his switchblade, slashes Billy (apparently mortally) and then carves up a fat intruding master sergeant, killing him. Physically and dramatically, this seems like an arbitrarily gory denouement, but the logic of inevitable violence has governed the play all along.

Director Mike Nichols' work is clean, powerful and electric, and he has elicited from Dorian Harewood a shattering performance that is equally intense in its falsely gibing nonchalance and in its true sorrow. But what about Playwright Rabe and his obsession with the same terrain and subject? It is worth noting that none of his "war" plays take place in the combat zone. Pavlo Hummel probed the rigors of boot camp, Sticks and Bones exposed the unhealing scar tissue of a returned Viet Nam veteran, and now Streamers exhausts itself in an intermediate no man's land where fear barely dares to speak its name, or love its deviant desires.

A kind of psychograph may explain and link these three plays. Picture an adolescent growing up in a small town, probably in the Middle West. While sheltering him, his parental home gives him no rooted sense of identity and fails to enfold him in a warm, unconditional love. Drafted into the army, he cherishes the camaraderie but loathes the authoritarian procedures and is broodily apprehensive about his own possible death in combat. As an innocent, he is startled by his introduction to evil, or deviant, modes of conduct. He is forced to wonder if his friendship for his fellow soldiers is strictly that, or is simply a masked form of his own desire.

This composite figure pervades Rabe's plays. In classic terms his protagonists are all undergoing initiation rites. But the lack of catharsis in his dramas means that after the initiation, no induction into full manhood occurs.

Nothing like wisdom is reached, or even stoic serenity.

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