The Theater: Rags of Honor

THE BASIC TRAINING OF PAVLO HUMMEL

by DAVID RABE

A couple of G.I.s popping open beer cans with Mama-san and her whores. Through the bead curtain, a hand lobs a lump of steel. Thump and roll. "Grenade!" Soldier scoops it up, hesitates in stupid disbelief. FLASH! BLAM! So begins—and 140 minutes later, in an almost exact replay, so ends—The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. Between these two unanswerable exclamation points, Playwright David Rabe strings the lifeline of the soldier, Pavlo; then on that cord he attempts to hang what he sees as the rags of national honor, bloodied by the Viet Nam War.

To risk handling pain on that scale is a big gamble, and Rabe is a plunger. Pavlo was his first play. (His second work, Sticks and Bones, develops related themes of the war's moral crippling in more dimensions.) Pavlo opened off-Broadway last year. It is now in a new production by the Theater Company of Boston, with Al Pacino as Pavlo. The twin trajectories of Rabe's fresh talent and Pacino's intersect with concussive impact, splattering the audience with agony and unexpected humor.

Pavlo tells how a Regular Army slob stumblingly pursues through boot camp and battle the mythic promise of the recruiting posters that THE ARMY WILL MAKE A MAN OF YOU! Pacino makes Pavlo a walking antipersonnel device, a Bouncing Betty that chops his foes, and himself, off at the crotch. Pacino's previous roles (most conspicuously, Michael in The Godfather) have blazed with a menace that he now transforms into a quivering, infantile bravado, a would-be Lieut. Galley, played for explosive laughs. The only buddy he rescues is a dead one. The only atrocity he achieves is the terrified gunning down of a single old man. The only fight he wins is with another G.I. "Did I do it to him? The Triple Hummel. A little shuffle and then a triple boom, boom, boom!" And then we see that it is the defeated buddy who tosses him that lethal grenade.

The play is an antiwar cartoon, but a good one, and in the tradition that after all goes back to the Greeks. At the end, the dead Pavlo, head propped up in his Army coffin, wearing the tremulous smile of the child who understands his pain at last, explains what it means: "Sheeeeeit!" It is the ultimate comment on war and atrocity, and Aristophanes would have laughed, along with the Olympic gods. · Horace Judson