David Rabe

David Rabe , 1940-, American playwright, b. Dubuque, Iowa; grad. Loras College (B.A., 1962), Villanova Univ. (M.A., 1968). Rabe served in Vietnam (1965-67) and his experiences and observations there inspired his first two plays- The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971, Obie Award) and Sticks and Bones (1971, Tony Award). Both realistically depict the brutality of war and its aftermath in dramatic situations, searing characterizations, and explosive dialogue. In his third wartime drama, the prize-winning Streamers (1975, film 1983), race and sex-based violence tears apart a Vietnam-era Southern army camp. Rabe's best-known play is probably Hurlyburly (1985, film 1998), a gritty exploration of the shallow culture of Hollywood. His other plays include In the Boom Boom Room (1973, film 1999); The Orphan (1975), a version of Aeschylus's Oresteia ; A Question of Mercy (1997); The Dog Problem (2000), a dark comedy; and The Black Monk (2002). He has written the screen versions of his plays and other film scripts, e.g., for I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can (1982), Casualties of War (1989), and The Firm (1993). He has also written two novels.

Bibliography: See studies by P. V. Kolin (1988) and T. S. Zinman, ed. (1991).

Rabe, David (1940– ), American dramatist, whose importance was immediately recognized when his first two plays, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones, were produced in New York at the Public Theatre in 1971. Both related to the war in Vietnam, where he had served as a draftee. Pavlo Hummel concerns a neurotic and unhappy teenager who after undergoing his basic military training is killed in Vietnam after a quarrel with another soldier. In Sticks and Bones (London, 1973) a man blinded in Vietnam returns to his parents, Ozzie and Harriet, whose behaviour resembles that of the characters in a popular television show whose names they bear. The Orphan (1975) was loosely based on the Oresteia of Aeschylus and described by the author as the third play of his Vietnam trilogy. Boom Boom Room (1973) was revised in the following year as In the Boom Boom Room (London, 1976); and Streamers (1976; London, 1978) is a powerful play set in an army barracks in Virginia. Hurlyburly (1984) savagely portrays a group of male Hollywood hedonists in the late 1970s.

Rabe, David (b. 1940), playwright. Born in Dubuque, Iowa, he was educated at Loras College and at Villanova University, then served for a brief time as a newspaperman. His first play to be produced was The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971), which described the disillusionment and death of a soldier in the Viet Nam War. It was produced by Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival, which mounted all his plays in the 1970s: Sticks and Bones (1971), The Orphan (1973), Boom Boom Room (1973)—later rewritten and retitled In the Boom Boom Room—and Streamers (1976). Rabe took a deadly view of Hollywood in Hurlyburly (1984), followed by the less‐popular Those the River Keeps (1994) and The Dog Problem (2001).