Read Streamers. Didn’t like it too much for the same reason I didn’t like Odets: the characters are synthesized, painted, false, bizarre puppets. In Streamers a morality comes up and bops you one in the face. About queers: “I mean, some of ’em are okay guys, just way up this bad alley and you say to ’em, ‘I’m straight, be cool,’ they go their own way. But then there’s these other ones, these bitches, man, and they’re so crazy they think anyone can be had. Because they been had themselves.” You got it, straight from the mouth of 1970: queers, niggers, and all that good bullshit are in this play. Joe Normal, seeing this play, will assimilate it as some sort of deeper “reality” which he’s been missing by working at his insurance sales job. Joe Normal will see this scramble of swinging dicks onstage and think that this is life, this is the emotional grind that I missed when I went to college. Rabe does not play to the masses because his work does not speak to them. Streamers is a hodgepodge of larger-than-life army dipshits who we’re supposed to care about.
12/14/1990
Published