The all-American Nelson clan has to reevaluate their once-perfect life in David Rabe’s STICKS AND BONES (photo by Monique Carboni)
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 14, $75-$95
212-244-7529
www.thenewgroup.org
www.signaturetheatre.org
In 1969, Michael J. Arlen wrote Living-Room War, a seminal book that examined how the Vietnam War was beamed into the homes of American families over the television. “I do know,” he surmised, “that the cumulative effect of all these three- and five-minute film clips . . . is bound to provide these millions of people with an excessively simple, emotional, and military-oriented view of what is, at best, a mighty unsimple situation.” Indeed, there was nothing simple about the Vietnam War, and there’s nothing simple about David Rabe’s 1971 play, Sticks and Bones, which is in the midst of an unsettling, unnerving, yet mesmerizing revival by the New Group in its new home at the Signature Center. Part of Rabe’s war quartet, which also includes The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Streamers, and The Orphan, Sticks and Bones is set in the living room of that most American of families, the lily-white Nelsons from The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, who are living in an absurdist alternate reality, cut off from the rest of society, as neither their telephone nor, ironically enough, their rabbit-ear television works very well. Their only connection with the outside world comes in the form of their priest, Father Donald (a smooth and steady Richard Chamberlain), who regularly blesses Harriet (a delightfully madcap Holly Hunter) during his visits, and a hulking black army sergeant major (a commanding Morocco Omari) who delivers their son, David (a bold Ben Schnetzer), who lost his eyesight while fighting in Southeast Asia, back home to them, not quite what he used to be.
Father Donald (Richard Chamberlain) fends off David Nelson (Ben Schnetzer) in New Group revival of STICKS AND BONES (photo by Monique Carboni)
Gruff and direct, the sergeant major stays just a few minutes, as he has a convoy of other deliveries, returning more broken bodies and souls to confused parents and siblings. At first the blind David resists his homecoming, arguing that these people are not his family, but eventually everyone tries to make it work, with limited success. The fidgety, wholly uncomfortable Ozzie (a sensational Bill Pullman, his energy at times recalling Robin Williams’s) mutters about his past, a tightly wound Harriet bakes and cleans, confusedly trying to reach her wounded veteran son, and younger son Ricky (a very funny Raviv Ullman) drinks soda, eats fudge, and plays his ever-present guitar, willfully maintaining the fiction that nothing of consequence is going on around them while David hides out in his room with a vision of Zung (the mysterious Nadia Gan), the Vietnamese lover he left behind. Rabe, who served in Vietnam himself, and director Scott Elliott maintain a quirky, disconcerting tension throughout the play’s nearly three hours on Derek McLane’s wonderfully quaint 1960s sitcomlike living-room set, complete with swinging kitchen door and upstairs bedroom where we can see David, no longer a child, sleeping in a room meant for a boy. America had a whole lot of growing up to do during the Vietnam era, and Sticks and Bones depicts just how difficult the change was, rending the social fabric of a country still trying to get over the assassination of a beloved president. Pullman embodies all of that fear and desire, his every motion off-putting and unbalanced as he portrays a man terrified of seeing what’s right in front of him, his sometimes cosmic reflections serving as commentary on the history of twentieth-century American manhood. Hunter is a marvelous bundle of energy as Harriet, flitting about the house, flirting with the priest, and truly believing there are easy answers to every dilemma. Sticks and Bones debuted in 1971 at the Public Theater and won the 1972 Tony for Best Play in a Broadway production that starred David Selby, Tom Aldredge, Elizabeth Wilson, Cliff DeYoung, and Charles Siebert; it was also made into a television movie by Robert Downey Sr. in 1973. The New Group, which previously staged a 2005 revival of Rabe’s Hurlyburly and premiered his An Early History of Fire in 2012, gets to the heart of the matter with Sticks and Bones, even though it’s too long, it’s extremely exacting to watch, and it feels a bit out-of-date, as Americans now experience war, and treat returning soldiers, in very different ways. But it still makes for a gripping and unusual theatrical experience, that more powerful the night we saw it, on Veterans Day.