SOURCE: Christie, N. Bradley. “Still a Vietnam Playwright After All These Years.” In David Rabe: A Casebook, edited by Toby Silverman Zinmah, pp. 97–111. New York: Garland Publishing, 1991.

In the following essay, Christie discusses the feeling of instability at the heart of Rabe's plays.

David Rabe is a playwright of anomalies. His art consistently explores problematic cultural material or characters, and the artist himself is equally hard to pigeonhole. He is not really a “Broadway playwright,” nor a product of Off Broadway or the regional theatres. Because of the Papp connection with the early plays, some might lump him among the darlings of Off-Off Broadway, but such a label would belie quite respectable showings on Broadway and elsewhere. And Rabe certainly does not think of himself as a “school” or “house” playwright: reflecting on the early years, he notes, “I didn't fit anywhere. Finally Joe [Papp] did my work...