Sticks and Bones. Pershing Square Signature Center (Off Broadway). By David Rabe. Directed by Scott Elliott. With Bill Pullman, Holly Hunter. Running time: 2hrs 50mins. One intermission.
Sticks and Bones: In brief
Bill Pullman and Holly Hunter play ordinary American parents whose family is rattled by the return of their damaged soldier son in the first major NYC revival of David Rabe's 1971 satire of Vietnam War–era mores. Scott Elliott directs for his New Group, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.
Sticks and Bones: Theater review by Adam Feldman
“You must hear me,” implores a blind Vietnam veteran of his middle-aged, middle-American father. “It is only fraud that keeps us sane.” This kind of urgency jolts through every vein of the New Group’s throbbing revival of Sticks and Bones, David Rabe’s seriously twisted 1971 satirical drama. David (Ben Schnetzer) has returned from the theater of war to a theater of domesticity, but he can’t shake his shell shock, to the annoyance and consternation of his ostensibly TV-perfect family: father Ozzie (Pullman), mother Harriet (Hunter), guitar-strumming brother Ricky (an exquisitely glib Raviv Ullman). David is haunted, literally, by Zung (Nadia Gan), an Asian woman he connected with during his service, and neither his family nor their unctuous priest (Richard Chamberlain, his voice a well of smugness) can exorcise his demons of fury and guilt.
Although Rabe’s twist on home invasion is too long by half an hour, it is fascinating to watch, and less simplistic than its protest-play précis may suggest. Its subject is not Vietnam per se but a host of American c-words—complacency, conformism, consumerism, compromise—and the central struggle of the play is Ozzie’s, not David’s. Director Scott Elliott handles Rabe’s challenging tone with finesse, drawing excellent work from his ensemble cast. Pullman gives a full, layered performance as a troubled Everyman, and Hunter is just sensational: hilarious in her tension, tender in her worry, chilling in her bigotry. I wish I could say that Sticks and Bones felt dated, but this revival bruises.—Theater review by Adam Feldman
THE BOTTOM LINE The New Group swings Rabe’s hammer hard.
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