Contemporary American Playwrights - David Rabe

  David Rabe ‘There are times,’ wrote Peter Brook, ‘when I am nauseated by the theatre, when its artificiality appals me, although at the very same moment I recognize that its formality is its strength.’ He was speaking in the context of a play inspired by a distant war in which his own country allegedly had no direct involvement. He, and others, however, ‘quite sud- denly felt that Vietnam was more powerful, more acute, more insistent a situation than any drama that already existed between covers’. 1 It is notable that one of the first plays about Vietnam (US, ) was staged not in the United States, and not by a politically radical theatre company, but in England, and by a state-subsidised theatre whose repu- tation was built on productions of Elizabethan drama, though, under Brook, the Royal Shakespeare Company was in the middle of a period of experimentation in part inspired by the theories of Antonin Artaud. Admittedly, the Open Theatre’s Joseph Chaikin was in England for the performance (the Open Theatre which produced Megan Terry’s Viet Rock). Admittedly, too, in that same year, the director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, R.G. Davis, writing in the Tulane Drama Review, called for the creation of what he called ‘Guerrilla Theatre’. The same issue of this journal included a one-page proposed play called Kill Viet Cong, in which a man, apparently a member of the audience, is invited to shoot a Viet Cong soldier. 2 But at that stage the American theatre was only just beginning to respond to the developing war, with the Bread and Puppet Theatre joining public rallies, and the Living Theatre drawing on images from Vietnam in Paradise Now () and Commune (). Davis begins his article by quoting Freud’s observation that ‘Art is almost always harmless and beneficent; it does not seek to be anything else but an illusion. Save in the case of a few people who are, one might  1 Peter Brook, The Shifting Point: Forty Years of Theatrical Exploration – (London, ), p. . 2 R. G. Davis, ‘Guerrilla Theatre’, Tulane Drama Review, , (Summer ), p. . say, obsessed by art, it never dares to make any attacks on the realm of reality’ (‘Guerrilla Theatre’, p. ). He accuses the American theatre in particular of lacking such an obsession, before outlining plans which sound remarkably like a defence of the Mime Troupe’s own mode of operations. Within two years he was personally inviting audiences to take to the streets with guns. It was, nonetheless, Peter Brook’s produc- tion of US, followed by the film version, which arguably had the great- est impact. For Brook: all theatre as we know it fails to touch the issues that can most powerfully concern actors and audiences at the actual moment when they meet. For common sense is outraged by the supposition that old wars in old words are more living than new ones, that ancient atrocities make civilized after-dinner fare, whilst current atrocities are not worthy of attention. (Brook, The Shifting Point,p.) But his doubts went deeper than a conviction that theatre avoids the con- temporary, that while operating in the present tense it deploys the lan- guage and methodology of the past. He feared that ‘No work of art has yet made a better man’, indeed that ‘the more barbaric the people the more they appear to appreciate the arts’ (p. ). These last remarks are taken from what he chose to call his ‘Manifesto for the Sixties’, and are clearly not as absolutist as they seem, since he then set himself to create a series of productions which sought, as he explained, to ‘make us lose our balance’, to ‘help us see better’ (p. ). Nor was he offering a critique of Shakespeare, for example, but of what the theatre had chosen to make of Shakespeare. As he observed, ‘the dead man moves, we stay still . . . It is not the Shakespearean method that interests us. It is the Shakespearean ambition. The ambition to question people and society in action, in relation to human existence’ (p. ). It was that ambition which lay behind the production of US.A group of twenty-five actors, working with a number of writers, spent several months exploring the Vietnamese situation. The play itself emerged from a fifteen-week rehearsal period. Brook had no interest in a Theatre of Fact, believing documentaries to be the business of other media (in that he contrasted with the German author Peter Weiss, whose  play, Discourse on Vietnam, set out to offer what was in effect a politically committed history of Vietnam from pre-Christian times to the present). His aim was not propaganda, though he was later accused of this in the United States. He wished to confront the audience with the gap between the horrors of Vietnam and ordinary life, an objective which David Rabe  culminated, at the end of the production, when ‘all pretences of play- acting ceased and actor and audience together paused, at a moment when they and Vietnam were looking one another in the face’ (Brook, The Shifting Point,p.). This moment was not offered as an accusation or reproach, though there were those who took it as such, but as an opportunity, for actors and audience alike, to question where they stood in relation to what they had seen. There is, perhaps, a deal of naivety here, not least in the notion that the actors could lay aside all pretence of play-acting. Indeed, in that pro- tracted period of silence (ten or fifteen minutes) the audience was itself turned into so many actors, performing for the benefit of those who sur- rounded them and even for themselves. What is interesting is Brook’s attempt to find some way in which subject matter as powerful as he wished to present could be communicated. Elsewhere in the piece a butterfly was supposedly set alight, inspiring a familiar British response, since for the British animals are liable to come somewhere above man in the chain of being. And though this was doubtless part of Brook’s cal- culation, as audiences were asked to confront the discrepancy between their immediate alarm for the insect (in fact made of paper) and their more distant concern for those dying, or immolating themselves in Vietnam (in the film version a monk in Vietnam and a Quaker in Washington are seen burning themselves to death), even for those less naive the gesture was potentially distracting as technical questions momentarily displaced moral ones. Such moments, though, were designed to create what elsewhere he has referred to as ‘an acid burn’ (The Shifting Point,p.), for he believes that it is not enough to state ideas, they have to be burnt into the memory, whether that idea is Mother Courage drawing her cart or two tramps under a tree. The play’s ambiguous title was designed to bring home to British audiences their own responsibility for events supposedly that of others. Even after stage and film versions, however, Brook could not convince himself that theatre had the power to shift the course of history. It is said that The Marriage of Figaro launched the French Revolution, but I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that plays and films and works of art operate this way. Goya’s Disasters of War and Picasso’s Guernica have always seemed the great models, yet they achieved no practical results. Perhaps we do ourselves a great disservice in pitching the question so falsely. Will this act of protest stop the killing? we ask, knowing that it won’t, yet half hoping that in a miraculous way it might. Then it doesn’t, and we feel cheated. Is the act, then, worth making? Is there a choice? (The Shifting Point,p.)  Contemporary American playwrights That last question is clearly rhetorical, for he believes, and says, that ‘truth is a radical remedy’ (p. ), while aware that truth is not so easily recuperated. But there is a more profound problem having to do with the consequence of shifting experience from the moral to the aesthetic sphere. US took its place in the RSC and Peter Brook’s exploration of theatrical possibilities. It followed his production of the Marat/Sade () and preceded his radical revisioning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (). It bears the marks of his exposure to Artaud. The theatre, after all, has its own logic and procedures, its own imperatives, casuistries and honesties. And in common with the other arts it has the greatest difficulty in approaching extreme situations, though Brook himself called precisely for a theatre of extremes. Vietnam posed such a problem to the dramatist but then so, too, did the Holocaust. Where is the com- manding play about the Second World War? It is not hard to see the attraction of the Theatre of Fact. It has the virtue if not of unmediated fact, since the writer becomes an editor, then at least of apparently reducing aesthetic contamination. But it surren- ders other possibilities which depend precisely on distorting the literal, on plunging down into fractured psyches. Like Peter Weiss’s play it is drawn to the epic, to historicity, chronicity. Even allowing for the pow- erful authenticity that is a product of testimony, however, it necessarily abjures visions, dreams, nightmares, the inexpressible trauma. It denies itself the communicative power of fantasy, of a theatre in which lan- guage may work against action, character be problematic, truth be a product not of verifiable event but wilful distortion. This was a sacrifice that a playwright who grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, was not prepared to make, a man who had traded an ambition to be a professional football player for graduate training in theatre at Villanova and who, on drop- ping out, had been drafted to Vietnam. When Peter Brook was staging US in London, creating metaphors out of burning butterflies, David Rabe was serving in a hospital support unit at Long Binh or working as a guard, clerk, driver or construction worker. For a time, like the protagonist of The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel,he tried to secure a transfer to a combat unit. He was not, in other words, a reluctant soldier. As he later explained, ‘like Pavlo . . . at the time I was drafted, unless you were fairly politically astute, there was no war. It didn’t exist. It was about to exist in a big way, but it didn’t.’ 3 He was drafted in  and served in . He tried to keep a journal but failed, David Rabe  3 Eric Schroeder, ed., Vietnam: We’ve All Been There (Westport, CT, ), p. . too aware of the gap between available language and the experience he wanted to describe: ‘I was acutely aware, and in a way that makes writing impossible, of the existence of language as mere symbol.’ 4 Unable pre- cisely to capture the sound of cannon, the dust that fell from the tent- folds, ‘in an utterly visceral way, I detested any lesser endeavor. The events around me, huge and continual, were the things obsessing me’ (Basic Training, p. xvii). His attempts to write ‘resulted in a kind of double vision that made everything too intense’. 5 To transmute disturbing events into language was to do violence to both: ‘not only to see the dead and crippled, the bodies, beggars, lepers, but to replay in your skull their desperation and the implications of their pain’. This ‘seemed a lunatic journey’ (p. xvii). Even his letters, he has confessed, grew more prosaic and fraudulent. Rabe was born, in , in Dubuque, Iowa, of Catholic parents. Both in high school and at university (first Loras College in Iowa and then, after , Villanova in Pennsylvania), he had a reputation as a budding writer, in  one of his plays, Bridges, receiving a workshop production. He was drafted at the age of twenty-five, having flirted with the idea of becoming a conscientious objector. At the time, though, he regarded the war as a just cause. Once there, he responded ambiguously. In his inval- uable study of Rabe’s stage history, 6 Philip C. Kolin draws attention to his remark in a Newsweek interview in which he explained his refusal to accept a leadership role: ‘I turned down the job of squad leader because I was willing to go along with the system, but not enforce it’ (Kolin, David Rabe,p.). He saw no combat, though initially wishing to do so. As he explained, ‘’I had wanted to go on the line. After two months I changed my mind. It took about two months for a lot of things to start going sour – a lot of attitudes I went over with’ (p. ). Attached to a hospital unit, he began to see the consequences of combat: ‘truckloads of human limbs and piles of green uniforms. The impact was terrific on anyone who was over there’ (p. ). On his return, like the protagonist of Hemingway’s ‘Soldier’s Home’, he found it difficult to function: ‘Coming home was traumatic, finding business going on as usual. For a while I couldn’t talk to anyone who hadn’t been over there’ (p. ). This was the mood he later captured in Sticks and Bones, in which the normality of home becomes its own kind of nightmare, an affront, a wilful blindness.  Contemporary American playwrights 4 David Rabe, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones (New York, ), p. xvi. 5 David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York, ), p. . 6 Philip C. Kolin, David Rabe: A Stage History and a Primary and Secondary Bibliography (New York, ). He briefly returned to graduate school before leaving again, this time to become a reporter. He had been home for six months before he thought of drawing on his Vietnam experiences. Having failed to write a journal he turned not to drama but the novel, regarding theatre as ‘lightweight, all fluff and metaphor, spangle, posture, and glitter crammed into a form as rigid as any machine geared to reproduce the shape of itself endlessly’. Theatrical form, he felt, seemed artificial ‘beyond what was necessary’ (Savran, In Their Own Words, p. xiii). Ironically, it was precisely the artifice, the self-referentiality, the meta- phor that ultimately resolved his problem. In  he was in New Haven as a reporter for the New Haven Register. As Barnett Kellman, who later directed a version of The Orphan, has pointed out, at that time Bobby Seale and six other defendants were on trial for murder in that city, Yale University was temporarily closed and a so-called Revolutionary Congress was called. The year before had been marked by riots, the Manson killings in California and news of the My Lai massacre. Rabe felt himself ambivalently placed, unable to sym- pathise with the war but equally repelled by those who protested it without knowing of its reality. In an article on draft resisters, quoted by Kolin, he described them as having ‘the rage of duped and frustrated love .in them,the will to vengeance of the scared child’ (Kolin, David Rabe,p.). Asked to review two studies of the My Lai massacre, he pro- duced an unlikely mélange of review, dream, diary and vision: I am twenty-nine. It is Monday. May. Spring. There is a pencil. Dusk. In my dream, where I matter, I have conversations with cats, trees, stones, other people, and we agree upon things. I ask atoms what they are. I tell them that knowing what I know is not good enough. I must know what I do not know . . . There’s more that I must write. More that points the way to the rim of a gun barrel. The tip of a muzzle. The tip of the lead that lies packed in powder. I’ll go to the editor – tell him the point of these books is bullets I want to do a review to hurt people. The design, I’ll yell, should be bullets! 7 Whatever its impact on the editor of the New Haven Register, the piece reveals Rabe’s stylistic solution to the problem of integrating his Vietnam experience into his work. He turned his back on realism. He had begun work on his plays in . An early version of what was to become The Orphan was produced at Villanova University, in Philadelphia, in , under the title The Bones of Birds. The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones were largely finished by ,by David Rabe  7 Barnett Kellman, ‘David Rabe: The Orphan, a Peripatetic Work in Progress’, Theatre Quarterly , (Spring ), p. . which time he had also completed a further draft of The Orphan and part of Streamers. His problem was that, on his return to America, he found himself at first in a society that seemed to have no interest in Vietnam (‘Everybody seemed totally removed from the war’) and then in one in which the reality of the war disappeared in the issue of the war rather than its reality (‘People were interested in simplifications, in the debate about the war rather than in the experience of the war itself ’) (Savran, In Their Own Words,p.). The fact was that he had no interest in writing a polemical work. As he explained in : The writing I did in college was dominated by an urge to interpret the world to itself, to give the world a sermon that would bring it back to its truest self, for I thought then (and I did indeed believe it) that the history and exact nature of both mankind and the world were known, universal, eternal. I no longer write from that urge (though I’m sure some of it lingers) but try to start instead from the wish to discover. (Basic Training,p.xi) Though his reputation was, for many years, based on what came to be known as his Vietnam trilogy, Rabe was not a writer of protest plays, not a polemicist rallying people to the cause in the way that R.G. Davis had proposed. His was not guerilla theatre, except in so far as he waged war on ignorance and denial. The plays he wrote were attempts to under- stand, to find a form and a language in which he could explore an expe- rience that he had found impossible to penetrate or express when its reality was part of his daily life. The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel,effectively the first of not a trilogy but a quartet of plays inspired by his experience of the war and its after- math, and which was initially rejected by many of America’s regional and experimental theatres, though going on to win an Obie Award, con- cerns the induction of a young man into the army and his brief time in Vietnam. It is not realistic, though the documentary impulse was a pow- erful presence in the first act which went into rehearsal at Joe Papp’s Public Theatre, not least because Rabe still felt the pressure to report that had led him to attempt a journal back in Vietnam. At first Papp urged him to break down the play’s linear nature. Rabe resisted, partly, he has explained, because he had already finished a draft of The Orphan, which dealt in fantasy and theatricality, and hence felt the need for The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel to sink its roots more securely into realism: ‘It would be the base from which I moved outward with other work. I felt Pavlo, the first written, had to be a play that was primarily about people. Therefore I wanted it done in the theatrical form in which dra- matic characters had the best chance of appearing as simply people’  Contemporary American playwrights (Basic Training, pp. xiv–xv). In the course of rehearsals, however, he came to accept the logic of Papp’s suggestions, the impressionism of the second act infiltrating the first, the stylistic gulf being closed. The set is described as a space whose floor consists of slats laid out, appropriately, with a military precision. It is dominated by the drill sergeant’s tower, from which he instructs the recruits. It is ‘stark and real- istic’ (Basic Training, p. ), an unassailable fact, in contrast to action which is, at times, dreamlike, surreal. In this space, itself a kind of stage, all of whose elements are to have ‘some military tone to them, some echo of basic training’ (p. ), private and public dramas are enacted. The army is, in effect, teaching Pavlo and the other recruits to act. He is trained in voice, language, movement. He is costumed and given a part to play in a drama not of his own devising. The theatricality that Rabe had ini- tially resisted becomes a central mechanism. Though the play was carefully constructed, and then reconstructed in rehearsal, it gives the impression of feelings and perceptions even now not fully under control. Discipline and anarchy do battle. Violence is acted out but its meaning remains in some sense opaque to its central character, Pavlo. He is no less bemused by the world in which he moves than is the ordered country which unleashes, and is the victim of, disor- der. The play is a montage of moments which never quite come together to form a coherent picture, at least not for the man who struggles to make sense of such alien experiences. He is like Saul Bellow’s dangling man, welcoming regimentation as a relief from alienation. He looks for meaning in the role he is given, but finds none as the world disintegrates around him. A fellow soldier is dismantled, like Nathanael West’s Lemuel Pitkin, losing limbs and his will to live. Pavlo himself looks for a coherence in his life that never comes. He exists in a space that can be invaded at any moment by elements over which he has no control. Never marching to a different drummer, he is an agent and not a principal. He fails to forge relationships with others which go beyond immediate and self-limiting physical needs. He has no private system of morality to counterpose to the contingency of the world through which he moves. Life, for him, is no more than a defence of the self, with no perception of what that self might be. Pavlo Hummel himself appears to be an innocent, exposed to the bru- talities and injustices of the world, a Woyzeck, wandering through an alien world, though his ignorance of Vietnam was shared by Rabe at the time of his drafting: ‘Like in this scene fairly early in Pavlo, I remember a sergeant talking about Vietnam, and we were all saying, “What? David Rabe  Where? What’s he talking about?’’ ’ (Schroeder, ed., Vietnam,p.). But Pavlo’s innocence is closer to naivety. As his brother suggests, he is ‘weird .a .myth-maker .a goddamn cartoon’ (Basic Training, pp. –). He lies, steals, is incompetent, contemptuous of others. There is, in other words, no pure America corrupted by war in this play, no true innocence to be violated. Pavlo is an orphan estranged from his mother, incapable of making relationships. The army offers him the companionship he has failed to find elsewhere, a role that has evaded him, a myth he can inhabit. But it also represents the chance of extinction for which his mother believes him to be searching. Rabe himself has said that, ‘if the character of Pavlo Hummel does not have a certain eagerness and wide-eyed spontaneity, along with a true, real and complete inability to grasp the implications of what he does, the play will not work as it can. Pavlo is in fact lost. He has, for a long time, no idea that he is lost. His own perceptions define the world’ (Basic Training, p. ). In one sense, indeed, it is tempting to say that Vietnam is almost an irrelevance. Certainly, taken outside the immedi- ate context of the s and read through the caustic ironies of Rabe’s later play, Hurlyburly, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel seems to offer a portrait not just of a country deformed by war but an America deeply at odds with itself, a society in which the shaping order of myth seems preferable to the anarchy which otherwise seems to prevail. Certainly here, and in his later plays, loss seems a central theme, as if something had disappeared from America long before the Vietnam war: some cohesiveness, some sense of meaning beyond self-gratification. Pavlo Hummel is an extreme case but he shares with his culture an attraction for fantasy and a consoling sense of community, less real than an expression of need. His own arrogant chauvinism has its reflection in the wider society, with its misogyny and its racism. Seen thus, Vietnam merely acts as a special case, a metaphor for a deeper sense of aliena- tion and estrangement. At the same time, war raises the stakes. Under its pressure both society and the individual are forced to define them- selves. The play runs time backwards, in so far as it starts with Hummel’s death. He is killed, it later transpires, by a fellow soldier in a Vietnamese brothel. From the beginning, therefore, order is inverted, abstract prin- ciples subordinated to more basic instincts. He then springs back to life, summoned by Ardell, a black soldier, ‘his uniform strangely unreal’, as well it might be since he drifts in and out of the action, a mentor, chorus, phantasm. He is a guide, a commentator, simultaneously real and a  Contemporary American playwrights product of myth, an angel of death summoned into existence by Pavlo’s need. He is a device for pulling together discrete incidents, as are the mil- itary drills which punctuate the action. The second act is more brutally direct than the first. Sergeant Brisbey, who has lost both legs and an arm to a landmine, begs Pavlo to kill him. A young private is tortured to death by Viet Cong who remind him that American bombers had killed their own friends. Pavlo shoots a Vietnamese farmer and is himself knifed. He learns certain truths: ‘we tear. We rip apart . . . we tear’ (Basic Training, p. ). As Ardell insists, ‘the knowledge comin’, baby. I’m talkin’ about what your kidney know, not your fuckin’ fool’s head . . . We melt; we tear and rip apart’ (p. ). Pavlo learns his own vulnerability and that of others but still, and in contra- diction, clings to the idea of his own final invulnerability, to the belief that killing can neutralise killing. He never learns the truth that Ardell offers: ‘When you shot into his head, you hit into your own head, fool!’ (p. ). As Rabe has said, ‘It is Pavlo’s body that changes. His physical efficiency, even his mental efficiency increases, but insight never comes . . . he will learn only that he is lost, not how, why, or even where. His talent is for leaping into the fire’ (Basic Training, p. ). And not him alone, in that these comments might be extended to America. But the play is not primarily offered as such an indictment. This is not a play that explores political motives. It does not offer an indictment beyond that which it directs at those who choose to be blind to events and the meaning of those events. As Pavlo’s body is carried to be laid in an aluminium coffin, Ardell intones an epitaph that underscores not so much Pavlo’s failure of understanding as that of those back in America, from his mother and brother to his one-time girlfriend, Joanna: Finally he get shipped home, and his mother cry a lot, and his brother get so damn depressed about it all. And Joanna, she read his name in the paper, she let out this little gasp and say to her husband across the table, ‘Jesus, Jimmy, I used to go with that boy. Oh, damn that war, why can’t we have peace? I think I’ll call his mother.’ Ain’t it some kind of world? . . . what you think of the cause? What you think of gettin’ your ass blown clean off a freedom’s frontier? . . . And what you think a all the ‘folks back home’, sayin’ you a victim . . . you a animal .you a fool? (Basic Training, p. ) The play ends with the coffin, on an empty stage, ‘in real light’ (p. ). That reality, though, is never apparent to Pavlo. Ardell’s final speech reflected Rabe’s own position. As he has said, Even though the plays were part of a political movement, in them I was trying to express what I thought. I was saying: You can do what you want about the David Rabe  [...]... words Rabe s play was one of a number which chose to explore the fast-congealing myths of the contemporary world by reference to classical myths But where the Open Theatre and the Performance Group stressed the physicality of David Rabe  the actors, who were a primary focus of their activities as avant-garde groups moving towards political commitment out of a commitment to avant-garde aesthetics, Rabe. .. explanation of the play in the opening-night programme: David Rabe s utilization of primitive Greek myth interwoven with contemporary bloodletting does call upon the audience’s familiarity with the Oresteia in all its versions, the Manson affair, drug culture, and My Lai – not to mention The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones, the remaining two-thirds of the Rabe trilogy But the knowledge,... situation The play begins with the scene Rabe eventually added to his first draft, as Martin, an enlisted man with two years still to serve, slashes his wrist, explaining that he ‘just wanted out’ Richie’s explanation is more direct: ‘It’s just fear.’12 That fear is tangible, throughout In part it is a 12 David Rabe, Streamers (New York, ), p   Contemporary American playwrights fear of being sent to... misunderstandings and betrayals that makes the final thing happen in the play (Kolin, David Rabe, p ) Streamers, which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play (an award matched by the Los Angeles critics), is ostensibly a realistic drama Setting and dialogue are naturalistic There is a  Contemporary American playwrights logic to the events, though a logic born out of sensibilities... about’ (Kolin, David Rabe, p ) For all Rabe s comments, however, there is little evidence that the women transcend the reductive images born out of male desire or apprehension Admittedly, all the men have found themselves ejected from their families but the unreconstructed women they encounter hardly suggest that the revolution has cut very deep On the other hand,  Contemporary American playwrights. .. that they have no alternative Chrissy has tried to protect herself against others by denying her natural humanity: ‘I don’t wanna be hard, but if that’s how 11 David Rabe, In the Boom Boom Room (London, ), p.  Contemporary American playwrights you gotta be, I’m gonna do it Gonna be a hammer and everybody else is nails in a world of wood’ (In the Boom Boom Room, p ) In so far as she succeeds,... anti-war play, or the idea that it offers a simple satire of American values of the kind evident in Albee’s The American Dream Vietnam does lie at its centre We are offered a brutally direct description of the murder of two people and the killing of a child in the womb David resists his mother’s suggestion that he should ‘just be happy’ (Basic 9 Stuart W.Little, Enter Joseph Papp: In Search of a New American. .. Bones, perhaps, takes us back to his earlier classic, for here is a play about a family with two sons, one an empty-headed hedonist, the other anguished, with a touch of the poet Here, too, as in  Contemporary American playwrights Miller’s play, is a drama in which a version of the American dream is exposed under the pressure of needs that cannot be fully acknowledged, in the face of realities so... sequence’ (Hurlyburly, p ), or to produce a work in which logic appears to play so little role and the real to be so deeply problematic 13 David Rabe, Hurlyburly (New York, ), p  David Rabe  Hurlyburly is a savage comedy set in a Hollywood that Rabe knew from personal experience In  he spent time there when he was getting divorced from his first wife Asked whether Eddie, the central... danger he exposes her to The third woman, Darlene, a photo-journalist, is herself traded between Mickey and Eddie, both of whom convince themselves that this a meaningful relationship while simultaneously competing for the charms of the fifteen-year-old It is hard not to feel the presence of David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago here, as of American Buffalo The confident sexual aggression of the male . blindness.  Contemporary American playwrights 4 David Rabe, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones (New York, ), p. xvi. 5 David Savran,. David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York, ), p. . 6 Philip C. Kolin, David Rabe: A Stage History and a Primary