SOURCE: A review of Still Life, in Variety, 4 March 1981, p. 102.

In the following assessment of the Off-Broadway production of Still Life, Hummler finds the play emotionally powerful but contends that it "goes too far in rubbing the audience's nose in the brutality of combat."

Still Life is strong stuff. Emily Mann's three-character documentary drama about the traumatic effects of Vietnam combat on an ex-Marine and the two women in his life is an unflinching and grimly convincing confrontation with the horror of war. It's too long and repetitious, and too much too depressing for popular taste, but it has the ring of truth.

The play is in the fashionable mode of current dramaturgy, in which characters address the audience in monologs and scarcely interact. The psychologically crippled Vietnam vet, his wife and his mistress spend the play's 90 minutes exposing their inner demons while seated at a table. An...