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photo by Christine Rodin
Here’s a story that pinpoints the status of playwrights in
America. The interviewer arrives at the Upper West Side
apartment building and announces to the doorman that he has an
appointment with Mr. Rabe. The doorman’s face goes blank.
Rabe, the interviewer repeats, David Rabe. The doorman thinks
a moment, then lights up hopefully. “Hoos-bahn Jeel Clay-burk,
ak-tore?”
Well, husband of Jill Clayburgh, yes, but David Rabe ought to
be better known as one of America’s four or five most
important dramatists. As the elevator sails to the 16th floor,
I toy with the idea of delivering an impromptu seminar on Rabe
and the three plays – The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel,
Sticks and Bones, and Streamers, all of them about
the Vietnam war – on which his reputation is based, but the
moment passes.
The afternoon mail lies scattered on the doorstep when the
cleaning woman greets me, followed by a huge Doberman,
followed by Rabe, himself surprisingly huge – tall and
stocky, with dull blond hair lightening to colorlessness.
Still boyish at 40, he has the soft- spokenness and casual
movement of an overgrown jock, Michael Moriarity in the body
of Nick Nolte. You can imagine a baseball cap stuck in the
back pocket of his jeans.
Rabe seems spacey this afternoon. He wanders off to answer the
phone (“No, she’s in California at the moment”) while I
survey the spacious, picture-windowed living room and peek at
the pictures of Jill mounted in the hallway next to posters
from productions designed by her talented brother Jim. At last
we settle down in the nursery (part-time lodgings for his
7-year-old son from a previous marriage, though, as Loretta
Lynn might sing, “one’s on the way”) to talk about
Rabe’s new play Goose and Tom-Tom, which the
playwright is directing himself at the Public Theater.
“I’m used to being around at rehearsals,” he says.
“Mike Nichols had me there every day during Streamers.
The hard part is having the responsibility for being some sort
of authority figure. I was always the writer, and the actors
would come to me when they were mad at the director. But
I’ve learned through this process that actors basically
develop an antagonistic relationship with the director. I was
taking it very personally until I realized this is just what
happens; I’ve got to learn just to take it and not be mad
back. So dealing with the emotional life of people is what’s
taxing, and I feel I’m more lacking in that than in knowing
how to proceed. Nichols was truly the best director I’ve
worked with, and I learned a lot from him. Basically, you
proceed through trial and error, and gradually something
works. But he’s extremely skilled in charming people, which
I’m not. There’s that tense point when there’s about a
week of rehearsals to go when people start to panic. I used to
go get drunk; now I have to be there.”
Rabe didn’t originally intend to direct the play; almost two
years ago he embarked on a workshop production of Goose and
Tom-Tom with another director. They went through two
lengthy rehearsal periods at the Cubiculo, and though the
director “didn’t work out,” according to Rabe, “I
learned a lot. I saw that I was coming up with good ideas and
making sense to the actors. Because we had eight weeks of
rehearsal, it was like a production in my mind that I’ve
almost seen, and I wanted to complete it. I talked to some
other people about directing it, yet I knew the play is
elusive. I had seen a lot of it work, and just having another
mind involved would mean beginning that struggle all over
again. And the production I’d been thinking about and almost
got would become something else. So I decided to do it
myself.”
Goose and Tom-Tom is somewhat of a departure for Rabe.
For one thing, it’s not about war (or War); its journey is
more internal and spiritual. And though it incorporates the
ultra-naturalistic dialogue of In the Boom Boom Room (Rabe’s
resounding flop of 1974) and the alternative level of reality
that figures in Sticks and Bones, the new play is
stranger, more difficult and, in the broadest sense, more
poetic than its predecessors. “I had been thinking about
writing something that would go off in a fairy-tale direction.
I remember sitting down and not knowing what I was doing. I
went for a walk and came home and this just started coming
out, so I followed it.”
The eponymous duo seem at first to be petty gangsters under
the spell of a lusty moll named Lorraine, but the play soon
spirals into another universe with its own laws of logic. Rabe
intimates that it has to do with the collapse of the rational
mind and the emergence of the unconscious. “There’s all
this concern about witches, and people turning into animals
and having another identity, and then gradually this quest
about diamonds comes into it. I feel very out on a limb,
because if it doesn’t work, it’s ridiculous.”
Goose and Tom-Tom is Rabe’s first new production
since Streamers was done at Lincoln Center in 1976,
although a Broadway revival of The Basic Training of Pavlo
Hummel starring Al Pacino played a limited run the
following year. During the hiatus, Rabe took a stab at
writing-for-hire in Hollywood. “By the time I’d done Boom
boom Room,” he recalls, “I couldn’t sit down to
write without feeling Walter Kerr on one shoulder and Clive
Barnes on the other. I hated having that feeling, trying to
anticipate what they would like. It really bothered me that
they could take away my livelihood. If you make a living
writing plays, and they write reviews that close you down,
they take it away. I couldn’t live with that. That’s why I
wanted to make some money. My plays didn’t really make me
much money. Even when Sticks and Bones was running on
Broadway and won the Tony Award for best play, I was making
maybe $100 a week the whole time. I made more from the TV
production of it. I wasn’t broke, but I was suddenly looking
at going back to teaching unless I could parlay my reputation
into something that made money – like films, I thought.”
Besides screen versions of his own Pavlo Hummel and In
the Boom Boom Room, Rabe wrote adaptations of a war novel
called First Blood, a true-life murder story It Gave
Everybody Something to Do, and Robert Daley’s Serpico-like
Prince of the City. It was not surprising that he was
offered a lot of material involving war and violence; his
plays feature some of the most effective scenes of violence,
portrayals of male fear and psychological manifestations of
war’s horrors in modern literature. What was more surprising
was that none of these movies got made. After Rabe had done
two drafts of Prince for Brian DePalma, Orion Pictures
fired DePalma and got Sidney Lumet to direct and Jay Presson
Allen to write the movie. That was the last straw for Rabe.
“I thought I was going to go out there and make the money I
needed and write things that really reflected my way of
looking at things. It took me a long time to realize things
didn’t work that way. They all talk to you like they want to
make your picture. Guys would talk to me for hours, weeks,
about making a movie of Streamers or Pavlo, and
I’d take all these meetings, and they’d sound like they
mean it, but they don’t.” He laughs, disbelief mixing with
a crazy admiration. “I don’t know what they’re doing. I
kept thinking, ‘If I do this, if I go to this meeting, if I
meet this guy, if I do this treatment, if I write this draft,
if I do this screenplay, if I get this actor interested, then
what I’m interested in doing will happen.”
Rabe doesn’t consider those years wasted, nor has he
completely sworn off Hollywood. He’s written an original
screenplay called Just Married, which may, in fact, get
made. The title of that work and Goose and Tom-Tom’s
somewhat more metaphysical examination of the meaning of love
suggest that his happy relationship with Clayburgh has taken
the place of his Army experiences in the mid-‘60s as
Rabe’s central creative obsession. And, as he acknowledges,
“All the movies that didn’t get done made me more money
than all my plays put together. And they gave me the freedom
to write this play, which takes huge changes. If it fails, it
fails, but at least I was able to write it the way I want
it.”
In the end, something failed – Rabe’s directorial
charm, or perhaps just his nerve. In any case, the production
of Goose and Tom-Tom came to a halt before the first
preview at the Public Theater.
Soho News, October 15, 1980
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