SOURCE: Werner, Craig. “Primal Screams and Nonsense Rhymes: David Rabe's Revolt.” Educational Theatre Journal 30, no. 4 (December 1978): 517–29.

In the following essay, Werner describes Rabe's attempts to overcome alienation in the American experience with a new form of expression.

Ishmael, dreaming in the crow's nest but fearful of crashing to the solid deck, provides the standard image of the classic American writer trapped between irreconcilable forces of transcendence and reality. As Richard Chase suggests, the greatest works of the American imagination create “a profound poetry of disorder” and “achieve their very being, their energy and their form, from the perception and acceptance not of unities but of radical disunities.”¹ David Rabe is, in these terms, a classic American writer. Rabe's character O'Flannagan confronts these disunities when, as a joke, he releases his parachute pack in midair, only to find, when he reaches up, that it is no longer within reach...