This riveting drama took New York by storm in a production directed by Mike Nichols and starring William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Judith Ivey, Christopher Walken, Harvey Keitel, Cynthia Nixon, and Jerry Stiller. Characters nose-deep in the decadent, perverted, cocaine culture that is Hollywood, pursuing a sex-crazed, drug-addled vision of the American Dream. Later stage and screen incarnations have attracted such actors as Ethan Hawke, Meg Ryan, Sean Penn, and Kevin Spacey.

Phil, a supporting character in the author's Hurlyburly, takes center stage in this haunting drama about trying to escape the past. A former mob hitman, Phil is in Hollywood trying to make it as a television actor. He's had a few bit parts, but is hardly a success, and he is largely supported by his wife, Susie, a waitress. Unfortunately, Susie desperately wants something in return, something Phil is not prepared or eager to give: a child. Phil is going nowhere fast when Sal, a mysterious man fr

A savagely comic portrait of an archetypal, middle class family, Ozzie, Harriet, David, and Rick, falling apart. When David comes back from the war blinded, he is pursued by furies that haunt him. Wanting to return their son to normal, Ozzie offers camaraderie, while Harriet cooks and bakes the foods he once loved, and shares her faith in her beloved religion. But David grows even more vengeful. Ozzie feels the foundation of his world crumbling. In a darkly hilarious scene, a Catholic priest

Full Length, Drama Characters: 6 male, 6 femaleExterior set, platform stage.The author of Sticks and Bones and Hurly Burly turns his attention to the seedy underbelly of American life. Chrissy is a go-go dancer in the squalid "Boom Boom Room." Resigned to a life populated by denizens offering little more than drugs, sex and violence, she searches for love and beauty against this backdrop of nihilistic hedonism. Her desperate need to survive at any cost offers a glimmer of hope amid the glare of broken neon. Originally produced by Joseph Papp at New York's Lincoln Center.

"Compassion for anguished people leavened by a black wit and a powerful sense of the surreal nature of modern life."-Newsweek

"A superior play, perhaps a masterpiece."-WINS

David Rabe's work has been honored by numerous Tony nominations and Obie Awards, and he has won critical acclaim from the Drama Desk, Variety, the New York Drama Critics Society, and the Outer Critics Circle. In his new play, A Question of Mercy, which premiered at New York Theatre Workshop, he explores the controversial and emotional issue of euthanasia, delving deep into the ties that bind friends and lovers.

A Question of Mercy ventures into the living room and the lives of Thomas and Anthony, lovers who are struggling with Anthony's final, exhausting battle with AIDS. Joined by their friend Susanah and a retired doctor, whose help Thomas has requested, they fashion a heartbreaking friendship as they work through the stages of a plan meant to relieve Anthony of his illness and his life. Each character struggles with the moral and legal issues that attend the decision to help Anthony die -- is this murder or mercy? A Question of Mercy is a challenging journey into the characters' emotions and the battles that develop from their loving promise to let Anthony die with dignity.

Writing with tremendous clarity and insight, Rabe creates a passionate depiction of four people battling with the love, law, and morality that surround a loved one's fight with death.

The author of Hurlyburly again explores the struggle between hope and anguish in the human spirit in this story of two small-time jewel thieves united in a strangely unsettling friendship and the constant fight to prove to themselves and others how tough they are. But when their frantic scheming suddenly begins to betray them in mysterious ways, they find themselves trapped into a kidnapping and a murder over which they seem to have no control. Or do they? David Rabe's language creates and re-creates reality in constantly surprising ways, magically dramatizing the danger of the power of illusion-and the illusion of power-with force and insight.

David Rabe has been a major voice and crucial force in American drama since 1971 when, in the midst of the Vietnam War, he startled the nation with The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. The story of a native recruit's initiation into war, it is by turns brutal and hilarious. It won the young playwright an Obie and was hailed by The New York Times as "rich humor, irony, and insight." More than two decades later, Rabe continues to be one of our most compelling dramatists, acclaimed most recently for the Tony Award-winning Hurlyburly.
In this, the first of two volumes of The Vietnam Plays, Pavlo Hummel is paired with the equally intense Sticks and Stones, in which a blinded Vietnam veteran returns home numbed by the war and is astonished by his family's inability to comprehend their country's politics and his rage.

Longing and confusion. Hearts pounding, time ticking away. Early 1960s in a Midwestern town. Danny Mueller's working class life is one of fierce loyalty to childhood friends, Jake and Terry. But the bigger world is stirring once he meets Karen, back from college in the east and alluring because of what she knows, and unsettling for that same reason. The grip of Danny's past is intensified by his father, a German immigrant mourning a vanished world of lost prestige. For Pop the question is how to let go of a son and life he never quite had now that the future has shrunk to almost nothing. While Danny hopes to change without betraying the bonds that have sustained him, Karen, a whirl of brilliance, looks to J.D. Salinger for answers and to Danny for a simplicity he does not possess. To fall in love, to have a destiny, to know what it is. That's what they all want, even Benji hanging onto Pop, and Shirley, too, adrift in a way she could not have foreseen. old look backward and the young look ahead, while we watch from the future they long to inhabit. And it's all about to burn in the heat of whatever's coming. The way it always does.

Full Length, Drama / 11 m / Int. This volatile, incendiary drama premiered in 1976 under the direction of Mike Nichols, produced by Joseph Papp at New York's Lincoln Center. Revived in 2008 by the Roundabout Theatre, the third in author Rabe's quartet of "Vietnam Plays" is set in the Army barracks housing a group of young men, the "streamers" of the title: hapless parachutists who streak to certain death when their parachutes fail to open. This group includes Billy, a new recruit; Roger, a street-wise refugee from the ghetto; Richie, a sarcastic, bitter homosexual and their sodden, ineffectual sergeants, Cokes and Rooney. Awaiting deployment to Vietnam, they are joined by Carlyle, an angry, psychotic young black man, whose presence sets off an escalating spiral of violence and death. By the author of Sticks and Bones and HurlyBurly "Hard hitting and extremely funny. A masterly drama with humor, power and impressive depths of understanding."-New York Daily News

Good for Otto, which premiered in October 2015 at the Gift Theatre in Chicago, directed by Michael Patrick Thornton, is an unflinching portrayal of the world of mental illness and therapy. Drawing on material from Undoing Depression by Connecticut psychotherapist Richard O'Connor, it is a deeply moving look into the life of a number of patients trying to navigate personal trauma, including a profoundly troubled young girl, and one therapist, Dr. Michaels, who makes great efforts to help them, but is haunted by his own demons, and stymied by the financial obstacles of the American healthcare system. Visiting Edna, which premiered in September 2016 at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, directed by Anna D. Shapiro, is a stylistically dazzling exploration of the bond between mother and son. As Edna, a woman in the last years of her life, faces a short future plagued by her many illnesses, from diabetes to arthritis to cancer, she maintains the emotional distance she has kept from her son Andrew since he became an adult, and they both struggle to communicate about their shared past as they contemplate the future. Taken together, the plays form a startling and thought-provoking vision of American society and cement Rabe's place in the upper echelons of the canon of contemporary theater.

"The Black Monk" has been called a singular "collaboration" between two writers: Anton Chekhov and David Rabe. Based on Chekov's novella of the same name, Rabe's brilliant stage adaptation tells the story of Kovrin, the young philosophy student who returns from Moscow to the estate owned by Pesotsky, where he spent his youth. Kovrin and Pesotsky's daughter, Tanya, soon fall in love and plan to marry. But the appearance of an emissary from the unknown -- the black monk -- threatens to have a devastating effect on all of them.
Trouble starts in when Teresa tells her brother Joey that this guy Ray did something to her with his dog in bed. Nobody seems to know exactly what happened, but they do know that somebody's got to pay. So what is "The Dog Problem?" It starts with being born into a world where the wrong thing said to the wrong person ignites a chain reaction of misplaced passions and galloping sentences that race to a deadly conclusion. The playful title is revealed to be a wry pun on the Cartesian mind/body problem, as Uncle Mal, the aging mobster, must face his turn to be the dog in this darkly funny play about men, women, sex, betrayal, and ghosts.
Vastly different in their aesthetic, these two recent and highly praised plays embody all of the celebrated hallmarks of David Rabe's writing and art: unflinchingly honest and perceptive themes, starkly luminous dialogue, and the unsettling humor that have made him an icon of the American theater for more than forty years.