Streamers
Vietnam hadn’t yet become a cliche. Later shows, such as Miss Saigon, would regularly play the Vietnam card to add an illusion of depth to shallow stories, and these days references to Vietnam have become a kind of theatrical shorthand. A Vietnam vet is now inevitably damaged and dangerous, a story about Vietnam always involves gratuitous violence and horrifying imagery–including Bruce Norris’s facile and empty Purple Heart, currently running at Steppenwolf.
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When Rabe wrote about Vietnam it was still unexplored terrain. The closest mainstream cinema came to a critique of Vietnam then was Robert Altman’s coded attack in MAS*H, a film set during the Korean war. But Rabe had been drafted in 1965 after dropping out of graduate school at Villanova University, and he served a tour of duty in Vietnam during the years when LBJ was escalating the war. He became a grunt just as the conflict was turning into a full-scale catastrophe.
Billy, one of the three men at the center of the play, has decided he’d rather be sent somewhere cold–say, a radar installation along the arctic circle–than somewhere with snakes, like Vietnam. But he has no control over where he’ll go, and given the troop buildup in Vietnam, it’s pretty clear that most of these guys will wind up there. They are, in the central metaphor of the play, like streamers–parachutists whose chutes haven’t opened, streaming through the air, aware that they’re totally fucked.
This production explores the sexual currents in Rabe’s play without either caricaturing them or making them so obvious they obscure the other elements. The sexual tension is always palpable–as is the potential for violence. And when violence inevitably occurs, Minas and his cast aren’t afraid to throw themselves into it with a primal power. Yet Minas deserves special praise for the way he choreographs these violent moments without glorifying them.
