Fiero is a Ph. D., now retired, who taught drama and playwriting at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and is now a freelance writer and consultant. In this essay he examines the interplay of characters in the drama and the work's paradoxical theme.

David Rabe's Streamers is a play without a hero, even, perhaps, without a protagonist in any classic sense of that term. Of a play it is usually a helpful question to ask "whose play is it?" But in the case of Streamers, there is certainly no ready answer. Normally, the protagonist is also the plot driver, the character who has the most at stake and propels the action towards a climax and resolution. More than a character, it is the situation in Rabe's play that seems to move things on, a situation that is entirely outside the abilities of the characters either to direct...