Coming to Terms: American Plays & the Vietnam War. James Reston
a powerful point of view for the next time the Pentagon hands out 8,000 medals.
In short, all the important lessons of Vietnam are here in this fine and varied collection of plays, in forms that enable the lessons to be felt and understood totally with the heart and soul, as well as with the mind. Such total understanding, with the total acceptance that understanding brings in its wake, is the only way that American culture will come to terms with the Vietnam memory.
The collection also demonstrates a point that many, even in the theatre, will not readily accept: that the stage has a special role in presenting living issues of the day. Its tools are beyond those of the historian and the journalist, for the stage is at home with the interior of things. In that sacred precinct, very often a deeper truth lies. The theatre is not at its best when it attempts to reproduce history or contemporary politics, but rather when it presents a concept of history against which the audience can test its own perceptions. The stage can humanize history and bring it alive, while professional historians and the television are dehumanizing. Such dehumanization is especially common with terrible events like Vietnam and Jonestown, where the public is shocked by the unthinkable.
The stage must recapture its proper confrontational role, making itself important not just by dealing with emotional issues of recollection and memory, but with issues that the society debates now, today. For the stage can pierce the shroud with which television covers our world. This book shows that playwrights are ready to apply their special gifts to the contemporary scene, to reclaim their special wisdom in relation to the affairs of today. It’s up to the theatres to dare to let these voices be heard. Audiences, even in 1985, will respond.
Born in New York City in 1941, James Reston, Jr., a graduate of the University of North Carolina, spent three years in U.S. Army Intelligence. He is the author of two novels, several nonfiction books and two plays, Sherman, the Peacemaker and Jonestown Express. His latest book, Sherman’s March and Vietnam (Macmillan), appeared earlier in 1985, after being excerpted in The New Yorker.
David Rabe
About David Rabe
Born in Dubuque, Iowa in 1940, David Rabe was doing graduate work in theatre at Villanova University when he was drafted into the army. Assigned to a support group for hospitals, he spent 11 months in Vietnam. Returning to Villanova to complete his M.A., Rabe saw his first Vietnam play, Sticks and Bones, produced there in 1969. The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel was premiered by Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival in May 1971; Sticks and Bones opened there less than six months later, and was subsequently moved to Broadway, winning the Tony Award for Best Play in 1972. Other plays by Rabe include The Orphan, In the Boom Boom Room and Goose and Tom-Tom, all first produced by Papp. Rabe’s most recent play, Hurlyburly, was originally staged at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre by Mike Nichols and then moved to Broadway, where as of early 1985 it is still running. Rabe also wrote the screenplay for I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can. In addition to his Tony, Rabe’s many awards include an Obie for Distinguished Playwriting and the Dramatists Guild’s Hull-Warriner Award.
Production History
Streamers opened at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven in January 1976, under the direction of Mike Nichols, and in April of that year was produced by Joseph Papp at Lincoln Center, with Nichols again directing. Streamers won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the best American play of 1976. Rabe wrote the screenplay for the Robert Altman film based on the play.
Characters
MARTIN
RICHIE
CARLYLE
BILLY
ROGER
COKES
ROONEY
M.P. LIEUTENANT
PFC HINSON (M.P.)
PFC CLARK (M.P.)
FOURTH M.P.
Time
The mid-1960s.
Place
An army barracks in Virginia.
MASTER SSU, MASTER YÜ, MASTER LI AND MASTER LAI
All at once Master Yü fell ill, and Master Ssu went to ask how he was. “Amazing!” exclaimed Master Yü. “Look, the Creator is making me all crookedy! My back sticks up like a hunchback’s so that my vital organs art on top of me. My chin is hidden down around my navel, my shoulders are up above my head, and my pigtail points at the sky. It must be due to some dislocation of the forces of the yin and the yang. . . .”
“Do you resent it?” asked Master Ssu.
“Why, no,” replied Master Yü. “What is there to resent . . .?”
Then suddenly Master Lai also fill ill. Gasping for breath, he lay at the point of death. His wife and children gathered round in a circle and wept. Master Li, who had come to find out how he was, said to them, “Shoooooo! Get back! Don’t disturb the process of change.”
And he leaned against the doorway and chatted with Master Lai. “How marvelous the Creator is!” he exclaimed. “What is he going to make out of you next? Where is he going to send you? Will he make you into a rat’s liver? Will he make you into a bug’s arm?”
“A child obeys his father and mother and goes wherever he is told, east or west, south or north,” said Master Lai. “And the yin and the yang—how much more are they to a man than father or mother! Now that they have brought me to the verge of death, how perverse it would be of me to refuse to obey them. . . . So now I think of heaven and earth as a great furnace and the Creator as a skilled smith. What place could he send me that would not be all right? I will go off peacefully to sleep, and then with a start I will wake up.”
—CHUANG-TZU
They so mean around here, they steal your sweat.
—SONNY LISTON
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