SOURCE: "The Vietnam War: Plays of Initiation," in Levitating the Pentagon: Evolutions in the American Theatre of the Vietnam War Era, University of Delaware Press, 1992, pp. 137-67.

[In the following excerpt, Fenn focuses on David Rabe's The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1968) and Streamers (1976) as he remarks on themes and structures common to Vietnam War dramas.]

The significant dramas dealing with the actualities of the Vietnam War were written by playwrights who had firsthand knowledge of the conflict. These authors, of whom few had written previous works for the theatre, undertook to dramatize the ordeal and its consequences for both the combatants and the home community. These writers confronted the fact of war directly and chronicled in dramatic terms its psychological horror. Their plays, which attempted to portray the magnitude of the event and its immediate and long-lasting effects on both the individual and the collective American psyche...