SOURCE: Brady, Owen. “Blackness and the Unmanning of America in Dave Rabe's Streamers.” War, Literature, and the Arts 9, no. 1 (spring 1997): 141–52.

In the following essay, Brady discusses Rabe's use of racism and other prejudices in his plays, focusing on Streamers.

In his 1973 “Introduction” to the volume comprised of the two earliest plays in his Vietnam trilogy, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones, Dave Rabe links the Vietnam experience to American tribalism of which racism is a part rooted in “sex, or more exactly miscegenation” (Rabe Two Plays xxiii). Both these early plays explore the immediacy of Vietnam, one set in training and combat, the other in the middle-class home of a wounded, returned soldier; neither explores extensively the war's roots in the soil of American racism. In Streamers (1977), however, Rabe literally pushes Vietnam off-stage to probe the racism that contributed to America's prolonged, deadly, and...