Theatre in Review: Sticks and Bones (The New Group/Pershing Square Signature Center)

	Richard Chamberlain and Ben Schnetzer. Photo: Monique Carboni

Sticks and Bones is a political cartoon that elicits not laughter but a death rattle. In his savage portrayal of the denial that many Americans felt regarding the Vietnam War, the playwright David Rabe scored a direct hit on the era's most sensitive national nerve. I've heard eyewitness accounts of the 1972 Broadway production, noting that walkouts by appalled audience members were not unusual. And when CBS presented a television adaptation, half of the network's affiliates refused to show it. More than four decades later, there's plenty of shock left, along with a certain tonal indecision that prevents Sticks and Bones from being a fully accomplished play. But make no mistake: Rabe had the courage of his rage, and plenty of eloquence to go along with it.

We are in the home of Ozzie and Harriet and their sons, David and Ricky. Even in 1972, the decision to borrow the character names from America's most wholesome sitcom must have seemed like the playwright's laziest trope. Today, few audience members under the age of 50 will even remember the Nelson family. In any case, it is Rabe's shorthand way of suggesting that his characters dwell in a sanitized suburban world, free of politics, uncomfortable emotions, or independent thought. And, indeed, as the lights come up, Ozzie and Harriet are having a chat with their friend Father Donald about a basketball program for youth, while Ricky enters and proceeds to snack on ice cream, fudge, and a bottle of "pop." All that's missing is the laugh track.

Then the doorbell rings and in comes a Sergeant Major, dropping off David, who has returned from his duty in Vietnam, blind and traumatized. Ozzie, who can't handle bad news, says, "It's probably he's just tired from his long trip." David screams in terror, "I don't know these people!" The Sergeant Major is in a hurry to leave. "I've got trucks out there backed up for blocks," he says, suggesting that they are filled with soldiers like David: He lists the many cities on his itinerary, adding, "And when I get back they'll be layin' all over the grass; layin' there in pieces all over the grass, their backs been broken, their brains jellied, their insides turned into garbage. No-legged boys and one-legged boys."

From this moment on, Ozzie and Harriet find themselves living in a state of siege, as David barricades himself in his bedroom, shrinking from human contact. Harriet tries to calm him with glasses of milk. Ozzie's attempt at engaging him in conversation goes off the rails when it appears they have sharply differing memories of Hank, a family friend. Ozzie says Hank's missing hand was due to an auto accident in his youth. David says it was a congenital condition, adding that Hank visited him the night before he shipped out to Vietnam, announcing he was dying himself. A fatal disconnect has been establish and it will only get worse.

The horrors, big and small, continue. Ozzie discovers that David's Army cap has razor blades sewn into it for assaulting Vietnamese natives on the street. When Harriet confronts the young man in his bedroom, he tries to sexually assault her with his cane. It becomes evident that David is haunted by Zung, the young Vietnamese woman -- possibly a prostitute -- whom he loved and left behind. Nevertheless, she is still with him, standing by his side and occupying his bed, and whether the others can see her is, for the longest time, open to question. Harriet tries to be sophisticated about Zung, noting that such affairs are a fact of wartime and clearly implying that he should move on with his life. Ozzie, on the other hand, ruminates obsessively about his son's carrying on with that "yellow whore," listing the many diseases she may have transmitted to David.

It's a situation that will not stand -- David has brought with him a kind of moral infection, which drives both Ozzie and Harriet to the edge -- and David's assertion that the house is "a coffin" begins to seem increasingly accurate. In any case, innocence is absent in this household; Ozzie, talking directly to us, says, "They think they know me and they know nothing. They don't know how I feel. How I'd like to beat Ricky with my fists till his face is ugly! How I'd like to throw David out on the streets. How I'd like to cut her tongue from her mouth!"

The solution, when it comes, is both practical and bone-chilling, involving as it does body bags and towels and bowls to keep blood from getting on the couch that, we are repeatedly told, cost upwards of $175.

It's remarkable that so much of Sticks and Bones exerts such a powerful grip, because Rabe didn't fully provide a foundation for this bloody game of hide and seek. With its prefabricated situation comedy setup, the play starts out looking as if it will be satire -- the blackest of comedies, to be sure, but satire nonetheless. But from David's first terrorized outburst, laughter is overruled by images of death and devastation. As Ozzie and Harriet's psychological defenses crumble -- made especially vivid in the commanding performances of Bill Pullman and Holly Hunter -- you dare not look away. And yet the characters occupy a kind of halfway house, frequently leaving us unsure what to think or feel about them.

This is especially true of Ricky, the younger brother, who mostly exists to come and go, occasionally strumming his guitar or taking flash pictures of his family in distress. He's a joke, and a pretty decent one, even if it wears thin through repetition. But, late in the action, he sits down with Ozzie and, out of the blue, says, "I just had the greatest piece of tail, Dad." He goes on to make clear how he has cynically used a female -- not a nice girl, he stresses, as if the point needed to be made -- for his purposes. Suddenly, and without warning, we are asked to see him as more than a stage device, and the reversal feels opportunistic. It also points to the problem that haunts Sticks and Bones: Are the characters two-dimensional symbols of Nixon's Silent Majority and, as such, effigies to be burned, or are they flesh-and-blood creations, capable of real anguish, authentic fury? It's a question that the author never really settles.

Still, Scott Elliott's tightly coiled direction goes a long way toward making clear the location of the heart of darkness in this particular suburban living room. Bill Pullman's Ozzie implodes visibly, becoming weaker and more unsteady as the night goes on, until we see him lying on the sofa in a defensive crouch, his hands on his head not unlike the figure in Edvard Munch's "The Scream." Hunter's Harriet is, if anything, even more accomplished. Faced with a son who has returned a stranger, she begins by saying cheerfully, "You look just fine. You must be so relieved to be out of there -- to be -- " Her voice cuts off as it becomes clear that what she is saying is nonsense, her face frozen in a mask of dread and confusion. Her anger is blazing when she turns on Ozzie, accusing him of calling the police on his own son. And her inarticulate cries of distress come from some deep place where words will not do.

Ben Schnetzer's David is convincingly wracked by wartime experiences that he can't fully articulate and he is especially powerful when venting at Harriet, leaving us unsure just how far he may go. Raviv Ullman easily handles the limited task of playing Ricky, and there are solid contributions from Morocco Omari as the Sergeant Major and Nadia Gan as the ever-watchful Zung. In the role of Father Donald, who tries to counsel David, with disastrous results, Richard Chamberlain is a prime piece of luxury casting, and he fully captures the priest's unctuous manner, and, when spurned, the fury with which he condemns the young man to "Christ's black, judging eyes."

Derek McLane's two-level set, a model of late-'50s suburban style, with it spindly, blonde wood furniture and a stone wall fronted by a wrought-iron pattern -- is well-nigh ideal. (Interestingly, the staircase leading to the second floor is steep and lacking a railing, making it especially perilous for the blind David.) It is lit by Peter Kaczorowski with his usual fluency -- now with a thoroughly naturalistic wash, and now with a sinister backlight that seeps in through the walls, or a noirish look that mirrors the darkness falling on the family. Occasionally, Olivia Sebesky's projections -- film sequences of battle -- are shown on the entire set, creating murky images of the ravages of war. Susan Hilferty's costumes are perfectly in period and well-attuned to the characters. The sound design, by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen, includes a variety of effects with their own original music and a supremely ironic use of Don McLean's "American Pie."

Sticks and Bones ends with order restored, at a terrible price; in retrospect, it's the only possible conclusion, and yet it may leave you feeling oddly unsatisfied. Still, Rabe has composed arias of terror and bloodshed that are among his best work, and the cast goes a long way toward putting flesh on the bones of his creations. And, strangely, Sticks and Bones doesn't feel all that dated; given our national mental block about subsequent military adventures, it seems almost prophetic. Indeed, its view of a middle class that will do anything to avoid disturbance is not as far-fetched as most of us would like to think.--David Barbour