About the Play:
Winner of the 1972 Tony Award for Best Play
Sticks and Bones is a full-length drama by David Rabe.
An all-American, "Nelsons"-like family continues living its
1950s ideal of life even after a son traumatized by the Vietnam War
returns home, in this dark comedy from the author of HurlyBurly
and In the Boom Boom Room.
Sticks and Bones centers around a blind, traumatized
Vietnam vet struggling to re-enter his domestic life. A savagely
comic portrait of an average American middle class family, Ozzie,
Harriet, David and Ricky (echoing the core family in the 1950s US
television sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet), falling
apart. When David comes back from the war in Vietnam blinded, he is
pursued by furies that haunt him. Wanting to return their son to
normal, Ozzie offers camaraderie, while Harriet cooks and bakes the
foods he once loved, and shares her faith in her beloved religion.
But David grows even more vengeful. Ozzie feels the foundation of his
world crumbling. In a darkly hilarious scene, a catholic priest
called in to give his blessing is, ingeniously, rebuffed by David.
Finally, Ozzie and Harriet break under the pressure, for it seems
David is about to turn their home into his nightmare. It's up to
guitar-playing, fudge-eating Ricky to save the day and allow the
family to return their cherished status qua with a tidy, ritualistic
atrocity all their own. Sticks and Bones is the second in
author David Rabe's quartet plays about the Vietnam War, in
which he served.
Sticks and Bones premiered
in 1971 Off-Broadway at
Joseph Papp's Public Theater. Critical reaction and audience response
were positive, and the play transferred to Broadway at John Golden
Theatre, winning the Tony Award for Best Play.
Cast: 2 female, 5 male
What people say:
"Strikingly original anti war
play ... powerful." — New York Daily News
"A funny, cruel, mordant,
unsparing attack on American society." — WCBS TV
"There's a more unsettling,
eternally fresh dynamic at work here, centered on the fragile shared
mythology – of reciprocal and enduring love – that holds most
families together." — New York Times
"This fierce and unsettling
work, which won the 1972 Tony Award for best play ... Captures the
capital-R reality of war about as well as any writer ever has."
— Boston Globe
"Forty years after its first
production, Sticks and Bones becomes relevant
again as a new generation copes with a postwar landscape." —
Cape Cod Times
"It's a blistering black
comedy/drama about a Vietnam veteran being returned by the Army to
his nuclear family damaged ... Just when you think it's gone too far,
it goes a little further, leaving the audience breathless by the
end." — Barnstable Patriot
About the Playwright:
David Rabe has been hailed as one of America's greatest
living playwrights. Four of his plays have been nominated for the
Tony Award, including one win for Best Play. He is the recipient of
an Obie Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, Drama
Desk Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and three
Hull-Warriner Awards for playwriting, among others. He is also the
author of numerous screenplays, two critically acclaimed novels and a
collection of short stories. Born in Dubuque, Iowa, David Rabe
lives with his family in Northwest Connecticut.