See How They Run

APRONED MOTHERS scurrying back and forth from the kitchen, fathers equally at home repairing a broken television set or dispensing sage advice to the wife and kids, sons perpetually chirping about baseball and fudge--these are the characters that inhabit the surrealistic landscape of television situation comedy. From this same world--embodying everything most apple-pie-like in the American consciousness--comes the family in David Rabe's Sticks and Bones, which distorts these stereotypes without ever quite leaving them behind. Rabe is out to spare us nothing. Not only do characters in this particular situation comedy have to go the the bathroom; worse, they come out with lines like "I want to drink from the toilet and wash there." This is precisely what Rabe wants us to do--to rub our noses in all that is sordid and smelly in the way of life we've spent so much blood trying to inflict on the rest of the world.

Sticks and Bones is, first of all, the story of a blind and emotionally--mutilated Vietnam veteran returning home to a family that is supremely unprepared to receive him. But Rabe is talking not so much about the Vietnam War as about the cultural distortions that made America's involvement in the war seem right. His subjects are men whose lives leave no trace and women whose motto is. "We don't matter, only the kids"--generations of Americans negating themselves so that their posterity can do the same. Rabe is anything but subtle; nevertheless, his play is still powerful enough in the able hands of the Dunster House Drama Society to leave audiences weak-kneed at the end.

THE CAST DOES a more than competent job of keeping Rabe's sometime disjointed work llowing smoothly through moments of both absurdist comedy and high dramatic tension. Some of the credit belongs to director Warren Browner, who had chosen to de-emphasize the play's surrealism and treat it more as a parody of those cheerfully resilient American types, forced for once to confront and destroy the product of their own invested values.

This interpretation works well, aside from a few jarring notes. One is Eric Duncan's disembodied portrayal of the black sergeant who brings the Vietnam veteran. David home; speaking in harsh clipped tones, more like a robot than a man, the sergeant seems to belong to a different play. Another, more annoying problem is the cast's general difficulty in dealing with Rabe's overtly symbolic passages. Because of Browner's naturalistic handling of the play it's starting at times to hear characters suddenly hurting into literary effusion or even conscientiously using the formal "do not" in place of the colloquial contraction.

Nevertheless, the cast is generally fine. Even with his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, Daniel Beckhard gives rich expression to David's terror and alienation. His presence on stage is as disturbing to us as it is to his family, though our distance keeps our horror, unlike theirs, from turning into hatred. Beckhard is not always at home with Rabe's more poetic passages; but his performance is riveting when he rises to a fever pitch of outrage, denouncing the cruelty he sees and hating himself for listening to voices not his own, or when he subsides into a hurt, despairing sarcasm that admits the futility of his denunciations.

Michael Mitchell and Debby Snyder are almost equally as convincing as Ozzie and Harriet, the embattled parents. Harriet's hands never quite know what to do with themselves and her body thrusts nervously forward, as she seeks reassurance "only that we're all together and a family." Snyder conveys well the strained motherliness of a woman whose ideal of banal domesticity inevitably leads her to deny her own son.

Mitchell's role is perhaps the most difficult in the play. A man who has "grown too old too quick," who runs but no longer has any place to go, he alternates between wanting to build a wall to shut out his family and fearing that they will shut him out instead. Mitchell is most in command during his monologues, when he hungers after the past as "a time beyond and separate" and mourns the grandeur within him that he will never realize.

David Muggeridge is sufficiently vapid as Rick the younger son, whose mind crawls along the ground like a snake. However, Seth Rolbein, as the priest who substitutes pseudo-scientific racism for Christianity is no more effective than the character he portrays.

Sticks and Bones comes as a rude intrusion into our post-Vietnam weariness and revulsion, too blatantly reminding us that David's blindness is still our own. It's no surprise then that the Dunster House version of Sticks and Bones is playing to small audiences, but it is a shame. Rabe's play and this production of it deserve better.