The Theater: Air-Conditioned Hell

The bloody war in Viet Nam actively festers in the imagination of one of the more promising young U.S. playwrights, David Rabe. In his drama of last season, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, the taste of blood and the apprehension of imminent death gave the evening an elastic tension. His offering last week, Sticks and Bones, presented at Joseph Papp's Public Theater (TIME, Nov. 15), might be a sequel to Pavlo Hummel. The hero has returned from Viet Nam not dead but blind, a walking corpse in some perpetual nighttime of the soul....