Exit a Simple Soul

By T.E. Kalem

The harsh irony of war is that it makes men and kills boys. In The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, the first play in David Rabe's Viet Nam trilogy, the playwright concentrates on the death of a boy who has scarcely formed any notion of what living might be about. Now that the Viet Nam War is over and shamelessly and shamefully forgotten, the stress of the play has been shifted by history from outrage to pathos.

Pavlo Hummel (Al Pacino) is a simple soul, human kelp roiled by the shark fins of combat. He wants to be a good soldier. He is not. The only buddy he rescues is a dead one. The only enemy he conquers is a lone old man whom he guns down in terror.

Catching a Grenade. In a way, basic training and warfare are for Pavlo a continuation of failure and humiliation by other means. He had wanted to be loved by his parents. He was not. Now, in close-order drill under the commands of First Sergeant Tower, played with stony, unflawed implacability by Joe Fields, his mind's ear hears the traditional litany of first sergeants: "I don't love you. Nobody loves you."

Pavlo had desperately tried to emulate his elder brother's success with women. In Viet Nam, he is reduced to the cash consolation of whores. It is in a whorehouse, Rabe's metaphor for U.S. | involvement in Southeast Asia, that a lobbed grenade, which Pavlo catches and holds for a moment in paralytic wonder, blows his brief and baffled existence to bits.

If Al Pacino was not born for this role, no one will ever know it. He shuffles about the stage like a neophyte boxer unable to target his opponent. He speaks as if sentences had amorphous beginnings and no attainable ends. His fear wears a mindless grin in which false bravado joins true self-mockery in a stalemate of smoldering anxiety.

Except for Fields' formidable sergeant, the other members of the Theater Company of Boston are too deferential to Pacino and spotty in ensemble strength for the play's good. But since the stage is the combat zone that defines actors and deflates amateurs, it is heartening to see a film star like Pacino testing and proving his mettlesome craft on its native ground. T.E. Kalem

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