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The 1971 play, however, was consumed not the Vietnam War that was an integral aspect of its plot, as you might assume given its positioning in Rabe's personal playwriting canon. (It was preceded by The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, which premiered earlier that year.) That would give it a greater shot at timelessness, as armed conflicts, of any and all kind, have always been with us and likely always will be. No, it's sitcom insouciance that Rabe really had in its sights: the notion that the majority of people in this country were far too happy smiling away their brothers' and sons' and husbands' lives in Asia, and rejecting those same men when they came back home, when they should have been outraged at what was happening to them and how the so-called American Dream was disintegrating around their feet. To drive this home, Rabe even named his four lead characters Ozzie, Harriet, David, and Rick. Just in case this needs to be explained (it is 2014, after all), this references the 1952-1966 half-hour TV comedy The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, in which the lives of the real-life Nelsons unfolded onscreen in a typical Hollywood-ized fashion. In its way meta before meta was "in," it blurred the lines between show-biz reality and show-biz fantasy in a way that, if it's quaint today, still delights with its genial innocence.
Sticks and Bones won the Tony Award for Best Play after transferring to Broadway, and it's easy to see why it was embraced by a country in the midst of a difficult-to-understand and even-harder-to-endure war that was forced to seriously face these issues nakedly. But separated from both that zeitgeist and the Nuclear Family aesthetic the Nelsons represented, the play has to work much harder to land, and every element must be precisely in style and in sync. That's where Scott Elliott's production falters and fails. Though Derek McLane has designed an appropriately kitschy set to function as the backdrop, everything else about the tone and execution is wrong. If Elliott understands where the play is supposed to start, and how it needs to be slowly but surely corrupted as it unfolds, almost no hint of that exists onstage. Neither the before nor the after is tangibly recognizable, let alone tangibly different, which makes the journey from naïveté to disillusionment unconvincing at best and untethered at worst. Bill Pullman disintegrates beautifully as Ozzie, as he's faced with the destruction of his own little corner of perfection, but even in the sharpest scenes he seems to be straining to hold his persona together, and he's much less successful at depicting the ultra-wise father who hasn't yet discovered everything he doesn't know. As Harriet, Holly Hunter is chilly and robotic, and there's nothing believable about her efforts to maintain a Stepford Wives façade when confronting the breakdown of society. The opposite problem afflicts Raviv Ullman: He's superb at finding the boyish brightness of Rick, but has a poor handle on letting the dark bleed through. Ben Schnetzer is one-note anger and screaming as David, the one character who needs to be rich. At least Nadia Gan makes the haunting most of her largely wordless role as David's Vietnamese heart-grabber. The overall most successful performance comes from Richard Chamberlain, who plays the family's priest. Chamberlain presents, as no one quite does, a curdling vision of old ways unable (or unwilling) to yield, but growing in intensity as the opposition mounts. His early-first-act scene, which sets the one-dimensional stage for the battle to come, and especially his violent second-act tête-à-tête with a past-caring David, are the only times you feel Rabe's heat pulsing from the stage. These moments show that Sticks and Bones can, on some level, still work, as questions of the role of religion and personal responsibility in society have been at the forefront of American discourse more during the last few years than at any other point in recent memory. But with the Nelsons all but forgotten, those messages can't pierce through the last several decades, let alone our hearts, unless they're delivered with far more detail, cunning, and care than Elliott and his team manage here.
Sticks and Bones
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