SOURCE: Kolin, Philip. “Staging Hurlyburly: David Rabe's Parable for the 1980s.” Theatre Annual 41 (1986): 63–78.

In the following essay, Kolin analyzes Hurlyburly.

Hurlyburly is David Rabe's auspicious seventh and most recent play. According to Jack Kroll, the play “made theatrical history of a sort.”¹ After a brief run at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, Hurlyburly was staged successfully in New York, not on Broadway but on off-Broadway, at the relatively small Promenade Theatre in the middle of the summer of 1984. It was directed by Mike Nichols (who also directed Rabe's earlier Streamers), boasted an all-star cast including Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt, Jerry Stiller, and others, and then, financially fortified, went on to 343 Broadway performances. While not all the reviews were rave, overall they were encouraging. Besides the praise from Kroll (“a powerful, permanent contribution to American drama”), Frank Rich observed that “Hurlyburly offers some of Mr. Rabe's most inventive and disturbing writing...