Sticks and Bones

Sticks and Bones (1971), a play by David Rabe. [ Public Theatre, 366 perf.; Tony, NYDCC Awards.] Ozzie (Tom Aldredge) and Harriet (Elizabeth Wilson) are typical Americans with two typical American sons, David (David Selby) and Rick (Cliff De Young). But when David returns from the Vietnam War blind and emotionally numb, he proves an embarrassment to his family, especially when he keeps talking to a Vietnamese girl whom he insists follows him around but whom no one else can see. Not knowing what else to do with David, Ozzie and Harriet convince him to commit suicide. Rick lends him a razor and even helps his brother cut his wrists. Then Rick rushes to take one last photograph of David for the family album. The play was praised by Douglas Watt of the Daily News as a “serious and strikingly original antiwar play . . . a powerful human document.” Ozzie and Harriet Nelson and their sons Rick and David were performers in an early television series about an apple‐pie American family. The New York Shakespeare Festival production was so popular Off Broadway that it transferred to Broadway for a long run.

David Rabe 1969

Sticks and Bones is one of several plays playwright David Rabe wrote about the Vietnam War and its effect on those who fought in it. In this play, a black comedy/drama, Rabe focuses on David, a physically blind veteran who has returned home to his morally blind family. He is alienated from them because he has changed and they cannot understand or accept him and what he has experienced. The tensions surrounding David reveal problems with each member of the family. Rabe emphasizes the denial common to many Americans who were stateside during the war by parodying an archetypical American family. Some of the characters’ names come from a popular television sitcom family of the 1950s and 1960s, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.Rabe uses many varied writing styles, ideas, and symbols in the play. Critics were divided over the play, Rabe’s writing, and its effectiveness.

A Vietnam veteran himself, Rabe wrote Sticks and Bones while he was a graduate student at Villanova University in the late 1960s. The play made its debut there in 1969. After the off-Broadway success of another Vietnam play of Rabe’s, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel in early 1971, Sticks and Bones also opened off Broadway at the Florence Sutro Anspacher Theatre in November of 1971. Sticks and Bones later transferred to Broadway’s John Golden Theatre in 1972 and ran for a total of 366 performances. The play won numerous accolades, including the Elizabeth Hull-Kate Warriner Award from the Dramatists Guild in 1971, the 1972 Antoinette Perry Award (Tony Award) for best play, and the Outer Critics Circle Award.

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