The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel
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In the 1992 afterword to the two-volume edition of his “Vietnam Plays,” David Rabe writes: “Since the end of the [Vietnam] war the level of violence accepted as routine in this society has risen steadily, and there are times when I think that the war was the turning point, the launch pad that fired us into this lethal drift….The poison was not so much that we did what we did as the way we denied that we were doing what we could see ourselves doing on television.” If denial “cut the last moral tether” that kept our violence in check, as Rabe goes on to suggest, so did a more concrete reality, I think: loss. America was defeated in Vietnam for various reasons, including domestic division over the effort’s justifiability and our military’s unreadiness for jungle guerrilla warfare, and that defeat left a festering wound that runs deeper than its obvious manifestations in recent controversies–over Robert McNamara’s confession that “we were wrong” to fight, or whether we should have reestablished diplomatic and trade relations with Vietnam’s communist government. Vietnam is a fundamental element in the cultural and political war that rages today, with right- and left-wing extremists vying for possession of a shifting center. The intense dislike of President Clinton in some circles goes beyond disagreements over policy or ideology to his image as a draft-dodging war protester. And much of the admiration being afforded retired general Colin Powell’s shadow candidacy for the presidency is based on his service in ‘Nam–never mind that he was the operations officer who drafted the first official denial of the My Lai massacre.
Reshaped with the help of its original producer and director–Joe Papp and Jeff Bleckner respectively–Rabe’s play is a deeply personal work that would be improved by firmer editing. Overlong and indulgent, it may seem ungainly to audiences familiar with the sharper works that followed it. But despite its shortcomings, Pavlo Hummel has the power of emotional authenticity–and many affecting sequences in this well-acted revival from Thunder Road Ensemble.
Before The Normal Heart and As Is, long before Angels in America and Jeffrey, there was One. A monologue by a gay man with AIDS, the play was premiered in 1982 by Chicago’s Lionheart Gay Theater at a Halsted Street gay bar called Company–and was heralded in Variety, USA Today, and other publications as the first “AIDS play.”
