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Streamers
By David Rabe
Produced by The Gift Theatre
4802 N. Milwaukee Ave.
Chicago, IL
Tickets: 773- 283-7071 or www.thegifttheatre.org , $20-$25
Thur-Sat at 7:30 p.m., Sat matinee at 2:30 p.m.
Running time is 2 hours with one intermission
Through November 16th
Free Fall Into Darkness
David Rabe’s hard-hitting Vietnam-era chronicle of five GI’s awaiting deployment to the war is as compelling as it was when it opened some 30 years ago. The setting is a cramped 1965 army barracks room somewhere in the U.S. with a powder keg of human emotions that is about to explode. As a rising level of anxiety and fear becomes palpable, so do issues of race, class, sexuality and prejudice…along with a healthy dose of alcoholism. Streamers is a frank and, frankly, non-flattering look at both the army and at America.
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Director Daniel J. Ahlfeld’s staging of the show is uneven - a bit awkward one moment, explosive the next – but he has an outstanding cast of veteran actors who deliver the emotionally charged content of the soldiers in a big way. Emanueal Buckley is Carlyle, a ghetto brother with a chip on his soldier the size of a tank. He is a downright mean paranoid who really just needs to belong somewhere and have some place to call home. Buckley plays the nuance of this very difficult role with a lot of finesse. John Kelly Connolly and John Gawlik are Rooney and Cokes, hard-drinking, hell-raising sergeants in charge of the place. When these two combat veteran lifers get in someone’s face, they are genuinely frightening. Add John Tovar’s convincing fight choreography to the mix and what you get is a show that keeps the audience on the edge of their seats.
The title of the play is army slang for a parachute that doesn’t open. It is a reference to soldiers who are praying for some sort of miracle in the brief time before they will die. The creeping realization of impending death is the only thing that the soldiers in Streamers have in common. Richie (Kenny Mihlfried) is a rich boy homosexual from Manhattan who joined the army hoping to be more of a man. He has his eye on blue-eyed Wisconsin farm boy Billy (Brendan Donaldson) and he’s not the first man who’s tried it. Billy has tolerated his flirting, but it’s becoming more overt and Richie isn’t denying anything. Middle-class African-American Roger (Evan Lee) doesn’t want to see this. He has gotten where he is by turning his back to things he doesn’t want to see, but the war and the emotional muck that is bubbling all around him and his pals will become impossible to ignore.
Streamers is yet another powerful drama from The Gift Theatre. The Gift is a personal favorite of mine in the small theatre category because they consistently present provocative material and have artistic standards that are superb. The art of Streamers is its timeless emotional content but it is also a hard look at 1965, a look that is greatly enhanced in this production by the artistry of Dan Gillogly’s meticulous sound design. One word of caution is appropriate: The language in Streamers is rough – really rough, but don’t let that put you off going. Streamers is a great show.
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Randy Hardwick
randyontheglobe@yahoo.com for comments
Date Reviewed: September 26, 2008
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