The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (Author Biography)

Author Biography

David Rabe was born March 10, 1940, in Dubuque, Iowa, the son of a high school teacher who later became a meatpacker, and a department store worker. He was educated at Catholic institutions for whom he also played football. He earned his B.A. from Loras College in 1962. Rabe went to Villanova University in Philadelphia for a master’s degree in theatre but was drafted before he completed the program of study. From 1965 to 1967 he served in the U.S. Army, with eleven months of duty in Vietnam. Rabe — like his character Pavlo Hummel — was assigned to hospital duty, and though he did not engage in combat, he witnessed fighting at close range. His experience in Vietnam — particularly his shock at the youth and inexperience of the soldiers dying there — provided the substance for his early theatrical successes.

As he recalls in the introduction to Two Plays: The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones, Rabe says that when he returned from Vietnam it was six months before he thought seriously of writing; he began only when he realized “there was nothing else to do with the things I was thinking.” Rabe returned to Villanova to complete his master’s degree, afterwards holding a variety of jobs, including feature writer for the New Haven Register and assistant professor at Villanova. In 1969 he married Elizabeth Pan, a laboratory technician. The couple had a son, Jason, but the marriage ended in separation. (Rabe later married actress Jill Clayburgh in March, 1979.)

Rabe made an impressive theatrical debut in 1971, with the professional productions of his plays The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones. The plays were received enthusiastically as challenging explorations of America’s involvement in Vietnam written by a soldier who had served there. The success of these two plays assured Rabe’s place in the contemporary American theatre, a reputation later cemented by Streamers (1976), widely considered to be his most accomplished play. The three plays are taken collectively as Rabe’s “Vietnam trilogy,” although they were not conceived or executed as a cohesive cycle.

Rabe’s Vietnam plays are full of dark humor and stark images, expressing with lyrical and symbolic language the rage of alienated characters. The most well-known of Rabe’s other dramatic works are In the Boom Boom Room (1973), about the humiliation and exploitation of a female go-go dancer, and Hurlyburly (1984), a bitter comedy about the Hollywood entertainment industry. Rabe’s other works include the plays The Orphan (first produced 1974), The Crossing (a one-act, produced at Villanova around 1963 and professionally in 1976), and Goose and Tomtom (written 1978, produced 1982).

In addition to adapting several of his own works to film (including Streamers), Rabe has written screenplays for the films I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can, Casualties of War, and others. The many honors Rabe has received during his playwriting career include an Obie Award, a Drama Desk Award, and a Drama Guild Award — all for Pavlo Hummel. He has also won an Antionette (“Tony”) Perry Award for Best Play (for Sticks and Bones), a New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play (for Streamers), as well as a Rockefeller grant and a Guggenheim fellowship.