I went to the Huntington last night with my good friend C., who has season tickets, to see David Rabe's incredibly durable Streamers, about troops negotiating issues of race and sexuality as they prepare to go to war in Vietnam.  It's by far the best play, and the best-acted play I have ever seen there.  Partly it's because Rabe gives his characters—all of them—meaty roles, and arms each with a separate idiom.  This makes for potentially electrifying acting.  The set is simple, the plot is not hard to follow, but the language is lyrical, and the implications of the action are profound.

It did not hurt, for me, that it was an all-male cast, in and out of uniform, and that they were none too hard on the eyes, either.  My favorite was Brad Fleischer as Billy, the sympathetic homophobe...


Well, I thought Fleischer played Billy as sympathetic, anyway.  And that's what I mean, in addition to the other meaning of meaty, which Fleischer also fits, of a meaty role.  Billy as he is rendered by Rabe and played by Fleischer, is not a two-dimensional bigot. 

Bigots in 3-D are arguably worse in their way, but then we're all bigots in 3-D, to greater or lesser degrees.  We  struggle with inherited notions and social conditioning about race, gender and sexuality, class and religion, and a hundred other things, besides.  And we are all attracted on some level by the mysterious lure of forbidden slurs.

Part of why so much of the drama surrounding these issues nowadays rings false is that so much of it is agitprop.  What is so refreshing about Streamers is its frankness—and this frankness has the ring of truth to it.  In our public discourse we don't acknowledge that every day people negotiate issues of race and sexuality in unorthodox ways.  That something ever-present in our lives lends depth to complex relations, that though there are broad rules (sometimes called "social norms"), in reality people seldom play by them, without adjusting them in all sorts of ways to their particular purposes.

We (that "we" that we call "they") are not nearly as pliant or compliant as we think we (they) are.  Nor ever quite as rebellious as we (that we that we call "we") hope to be. 

So, when I say that Streamers is refreshingly frank, I mean that it never falls for the reigning hypocrisies of our time that say that certain types of people are one way and others are another.  Rabe understands that it's one function of language to convince us of distinctions.  And his play is, even more than plays usually are, a meditation on the conflicts and consequences in language.

As for frankness, take Ato Essandoh's electrifying Carlyle's openness about his attraction to Hale Appleman's Richie, whom he just assumes is the barracks bitch. The scenario is pretty cut and dry to him.  When it's time for his "nut" he asks the others what the protocol is.  He assumes they have rules regarding Richie's sexual services, and he's all about respecting them.  So long as he is not denied his due.

(One thing I will say about Appleman: he is twice naked on stage, but his nakedness is to no discernible effect, which is a shame.  Appleman's was probably the weakest of the performances in what really was a crackerjack cast—with stellar, stellar performances by Essandoh and Fleischer in particular.  Appleman is cute enough, but his ass isn't such a stage presence of its own—and, make no mistake, there are such asses out there—that just flashing it at us is enough.  I did not get any sense from the way Appleman played Richie's two brief nude scenes that they were in any way essential to the character or the play.  Appleman is not teasing or taunting in these scenes, nor is he rushed and overly self-conscious, as boys in the locker room can sometimes be when they want to draw attention to themselves by pretending too hard that they don't. I felt, as I often do, alas, that the nudity here was a wasted opportunity.)

Carlyle's frank and pragmatic approach to sexuality is shocking, but it emboldens Richie. When Richie brags to Billy (with whom he's smitten—and who wouldn't be?) that Carlyle thinks he's "pretty" Carlyle corrects him. "No. I don't think you pretty. A broad is pretty. Punks ain't pretty. Punk—if he good lookin'— is cute. You cute."

These distinctions—this parsing of language—is supremely important to people, especially in matters like this. "It depends on what the meaning of 'it' is" is the basis of many of our moral judgments, as well as our prejudices. And Carlyle's attitude, experiences, inherited notions of what is what, and the language he uses to express all of this is counter to Billy's.

The conflict in the end is about how to label things.  The words we use to describe "it," whatever it is.  And it's very clear that with different words different things are possible, different things are allowed.  When we call a thing one thing and not another thing, we grant ourselves permission, or prohibit others.  In the beginning is the word, and from it flows what is possible and what is not. 

When finally Billy blows his top, it's a slur-laden rant that gets him knifed in the gut.   He's shouting "faggot-queer" at Richie and "SAMBO! SAMBO!" at Carlyle, who, after stabbing Billy tells Roger, Billy's black bunkmate: "Don't nobody talk that weird shit to me, you understand?"

But Billy's not given to racist rants.  In fact, just after Carlyle has slashed him (in the lull before stabbing him, which finishes him off) Billy says: “I’m a 24-year-old goddamn college graduate—intellectual goddamn scholar type—and I got a razor in my hand. I’m thinkin’ about comin’ up behind one black human being and I’m thinkin’ nigger this and nigger that—I wanna cut his throat.” Before he dies, he apologizes to Carlyle for his behavior.

Billy's clearly closeted, himself—not necessarily with his sexuality, but his education and class identity, in which race and sexuality are certainly entwined.  Billy's racist, homophobic rant and his apology for his words as he lays dying exemplify the struggle between that hard-won self-awareness and the recalcitrant self he's fought hard to gain awareness of.  Has his self-consciousness yielded him nothing?

It's hard to say if his faith in the ability to transcend what one is by what one says or doesn't say is shaken in the end.  For Billy it's what we become, through laziness, obstinacy or misdirection, that earns us disdain, condemnation and wrath.  At the end of Act One, he's lamenting that Richie may just not have been told something he should have been told.  Something that might have saved him from homosexuality.  At the end of Act Two he screams at Carlyle: "you are your own goddamn fault!"

We're not privy to each character's reason for joining the Army (personally, I find the rich Manhattanite Richie's presence more than a little bewildering) but if the military is good for one thing, it is subduing the personal and particular, ostensibly in the service of a greater cause, and there are hints that this is what appeals to Billy, the closet-intellectual of the bunch. 

I think it would be a mistake to judge what Billy represents merely by the prejudices at hand.  We have some idea that there are those in which prejudice lingers and those who are "clean," but this is merely one of the many hypocrisies we propagate in our public life. 

What's still brave about Rabe's play is precisely the language, and I found myself going over it in my head well into the night, as I lay awake in bed thinking about it.  It's a powerfully written piece, and it was powerfully performed at the Huntington.

My theater companion and I have a long history together.  He's a smart guy, but we have different sensibilities. When we see a play or a movie it's always interesting to get his take on it.  Sometimes it's like, did we just sit through the same show?

During intermission he was flipping through the program and turns to me and says, "you know, it's funny.  There are so many good actors out there, and yet, we always see the same ones—the same ten or fifteen actors." 

Not if you watch Law & Order, I told him.  Every one of the guys in Streamers had done a stint on Law & Order.  One guy had been in 21 episodes!  But I got his point.

Then he expanded on it.  He said, "it's like writing.  How many plays are out there?  And yet we only see a fraction of them."

I didn't say anything.  I wasn't sure if he was offering consolation to a friend whose work has come to nothing, or what.  But I'm always a little astonished at people's assumptions about the creative process, and what it really takes for a society to produce an individual who is capable of producing great art. 

I was discussing this with another friend last week—in a different context.  There is a mystery as to how things actually get done in this world.  Often we nurse the illusion of accomplishment by proxy.  I know people who can repeat other people's words and phrases and honestly think either that these purloined thoughts are their own, or that it doesn't really matter how a thing is said if it's obvious, even though it is often made obvious precisely by the way it's said.

The exact order of the exact words is essential.  I think if more people had to learn something as simple as scansion, say, in school, they might appreciate that in good writing, never mind the transcendent stuff, there are no accidents. 

To write lines for a character like Carlyle or Billy that sound at once lyrical and plausible is no mean feat.  Any dialect is a bitch.  And that's only one part of what Rabe has done here.  There's a reason why Streamers feels fresh after thirty years.  You'll hear all sorts of people saying it's because we're at war again, and "don't ask, don't tell," and so on.  But that's not the reason. 

Rabe is the reason.