David Rabe achieved national recognition in 1971 when two of his plays, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones, opened in New York within six months of each other. Productions of The Orphan (1973), Boom Boom Room (1973), and Streamers (1976), presented during the next five years, marked him as a playwright of exceptional quality and promise. The five plays depict contemporary American life as a senselessly violent battlefield. Whether placed in the context of the Vietnam War, recycled Greek mythology, or seedy urban life, the plays present an America in which inexplicable rage bursts into physical and verbal violence.

Rabe's plays have commanded serious public and critical attention for a variety of reasons: each is compellingly topical and sensational; each is a full-length drama written in an era when other serious dramatists had turned to the one-act form; and each was produced by Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare...