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Sticks and Bones

Sticks and Bones
Your Price: $17.95 CDN
Author: David Rabe
Publisher: Samuel French
Format: Softcover
# of Pages: 112
Pub. Date: 2016
ISBN-10: 0573705461
ISBN-13: 9780573705465
Cast Size: 2 female, 5 male

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.

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