Cast sabotages 'Streamers'

NEW YORK - David Rabe, best known for

Hurlyburly

, was long considered the playwright of the Vietnam War. A vet whose company once traded him to another company for a Jeep, he understood the deep damage the war did to the American psyche. In an essay written long after he wrote the plays, Rabe saw the war as a "swamp where history paused and could have shown us who we were and who we were becoming . . . an X-ray knifing open the darkness with an obscene illumination." But, he wrote, "we closed our eyes."

The flash and violence of Rabe's Vietnam dramas (the others are

The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel

,

Orphans

, and

Sticks and Bones

) were electrifying in the 1970s, and the questions posed by this revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company are whether

Streamers

is as good as we thought it was then, and whether it has contemporary relevance.

Young men, waiting in a stateside barracks, dreading being shipped out to war, are probably just as scared now as they were then. The play's central issues of race and homosexuality are still military issues and still combustible; this pressure-cooker piece is crammed with familiar elements of American drama - fatherhood, brotherhood, friendship, education, terminal disease, economic stratification, fatalism, courage. And like many war plays, it's a play about failed manhood.

Unfortunately, it's hard to judge

Streamers

' current power because the cast is weak - unconvincing and flat. The stage should crackle with unanswered questions, unfathomed motives, uneased consciences. But it doesn't, and Scott Ellis' direction seems flaccid and dull. (The 1983 film version, directed by Robert Altman, is far more impressive.)

In the barracks are four soldiers, two of them white - Richie (Hale Appleman), well-educated and gay, and Billy (Brad Fleischer), who has an uncertain past and is homophobic in ambiguous ways further complicated by Richie's romantic interest in him - and two African Americans: Roger (J.D. Williams), obsessed with control and cleanliness, and Carlyle (Ato Essandoh), violent, sexually opportunistic, unrestrained by civilization's or the military's rules.

Their sergeants, Rooney (John Sharian) and Cokes (Larry Clarke), are alcoholic old-timers: Proud of their ruthless "heroism" in Korea, they are now looking forward to a last hurrah in Vietnam.

The plot of

Streamers

is an intentionally grotesque muddle, a perfect metaphor for the war, and it should shock us into appalled laughter and stunned sadness. In a succession of mistakes, misunderstandings and bad timing, the tedium of barracks life turns hair-raisingly vicious, and it is no accident that the play's original title was

Knives

. "Streamers" refers to the men whose parachutes don't open, who go "into the ground like a knife."

The point should be that all these characters are "streamers." But there is nothing in the Roundabout's production that makes us feel their hopeless, catastrophic descent.

Presented by Roundabout Theatre Company at the Laura Pels Theatre, 111 W. 46th St., New York. Through Jan. 11, 2009. Tickets $64-$74. Information: 212-719-1300 or

» READ MORE: www.roundabouttheatre.org

.