696 The American Century: Literature since 1945Hommel (1971), Sticks and Bones (1971), and Streamers (1976). Each play addresses
the brutalizing effects of war, on the individual and national psyche, in a different way.
The Basic Training of Pavlo Hommel describes the transformation of a sad, helpless
young man into a soldier and then into a dead body. In this ironic bildungsroman, the
hero does not grow up; he simply hurtles, in eager innocence and ignorance, toward a
random and pointless death. Sticks and Bones bring the war to the home front,
contrasting a blinded Vietnam veteran, consumed with guilt and the horrors he has
witnessed, with his family, who cannot begin to understand what has happened to
him. By naming the various members of the family after a popular American television
series, Ozzie, Harriet, David, and Ricky, Rabe suggests its typicality. And it is typical
too, Rabe intimates, in its stubborn, eventually violent refusal to accept the truth.
In the end, rather than come to terms with their son and the obscenities he has
experienced, they kill him. Set in an army camp in the United States, Streamers is more
sympathetic and indirect in its approach. The characters are young soldiers awaiting
their postings: among them two African-Americans and a homosexual. The war in
Vietnam is scarcely mentioned, but it does not have to be; it hangs over the characters
as the imminent fate of some or possibly every one of them. And that fate is marked
out in the title: “streamers,” we learn, is army slang for a parachute that does not open,
billowing out uselessly above a man as he plunges to an inevitable death.
Like Mamet, Wilson, Shepard, and Albee, Rabe has enjoyed intermittent success
in and outside the commercial theater. The success of Neil Simon (1927–), however,
has been unstoppable and continuous. His first successful play, Come Blow Your
Horn, appeared on Broadway in 1961. It was followed by a steady stream of hit
comedies, at a rate of almost one a year: among them, Barefoot in the Park (1963),
The Odd Couple (1965), Plaza Suite (1968), and The Prisoner of Second Avenue
(1971). The structure of these comedies generally involves a collision of opposites:
odd couples yoked humorously together who sometimes achieve reconciliation and
sometimes do not. This supplies the basis or pretext for a quick-fire succession of
jokes, comic conflicts, and misunderstandings. The sometimes formulaic nature of
the humor may be one reason for Simon’s success, but so is his familiarity with his
usual dramatic setting, in middle-class, middle-aged, middle-of-the-road New York.
In some of his later work, Simon has moved into a more serious, if sentimental
mode, drawing on his own experiences. Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983) tells the
story of a young man not unlike the youthful author, growing up in New York during
the Depression. Biloxi Blues (1985) takes the young man into basic training in the
army; Broadway Bound (1986), in turn, takes up his story just after World War II,
when he has become an aspiring comic writer. Comic and inclined to gentle
sentiment as they are, these plays show a new interest in developing character, and in
relating that development to more general social and cultural change. In the portrait
of the family of the young man, too, they reveal an understanding of the warmth and
dynamics of domestic life, particularly lower-class Jewish life, that recalls the work
of Clifford Odets. Like the work of Odets, too, is the sympathy these plays show for
the dignity of the poor. As one character in Brighton Beach Memories puts is, “For
people like us, sometimes the only thing we really own is our dignity.”GGray_c05.indd 696ray_c 05 .indd 696 8 8/1/2011 7:31:39 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 39 PM