David Rabe

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Template:Short description

Page Module:Message box/ambox.css has no content.

Page Module:Infobox/styles.css has no content.

David Rabe
Born
David William Rabe

Script error: No such module "person date".
DiedScript error: No such module "person date".
EducationVillanova University, M.A., 1968
Notable awards
SpousePage Template:Plainlist/styles.css has no content.
(m. 1979; died 2010)
Script error: No such module "Parameter validation".
Children3, including Lily Rabe

Script error: No such module "Check for conflicting parameters".

David William Rabe (born March 10, 1940)[1] is an American playwright and screenwriter. He won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1972 (Sticks and Bones) and also received Tony Award nominations for Best Play in 1974 (In the Boom Boom Room), 1977 (Streamers) and 1985 (Hurlyburly).

Early life

Rabe was born on March 10, 1940, in Dubuque, Iowa,[2] of German and Irish descent, the son of Ruth (née McCormick), a department store worker, and William Rabe, a teacher and meat packer. He was raised in a devout Catholic family.[citation needed]

Career

Page Module:Message box/ambox.css has no content.

Rabe was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1965 and served in a medical unit during the Vietnam War. After leaving the Army in 1967, Rabe returned to Villanova University, studying writing and earning an M.A. in 1968.

During this time, he began work on the play Sticks and Bones, in which the family represents the ugly underbelly of the seemingly stereotypical Nelson family (whose names match the main characters of the sunny 1950s television series—Ozzie, Harriet, David and Ricky) when they are faced with their embittered and hopeless son David returning home from Vietnam as a blinded vet.

Rabe is known for his loose trilogy of plays drawing on his experiences as an Army draftee in Vietnam, Sticks and Bones (1969), the Tony Award-winning The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971), and Streamers (1976), the latter of which was included in Harold Bloom's Western Canon.[3]

He also wrote Hurlyburly (both the play and the screenplay for the film version), and the screenplays for the Vietnam War drama Casualties of War (1989) and the film adaptation of John Grisham's The Firm (1993). Rabe also wrote a screenplay for First Blood for producer Martin Bregman with Mike Nichols interested in directing and the role of John Rambo written for Al Pacino, but it was not filmed because Pacino found it "too extreme" and declined to appear in it.[4]

A collection of Rabe's manuscripts is housed in the Mugar Memorial Library, at Boston University.

Awards and honors

Works

Plays

Screenplays

Fiction

  • Recital of the Dog (1993)
  • The Crossing Guard (novelization of the screenplay by Sean Penn, 1995)
  • A Primitive Heart (2005)
  • Dinosaurs on the Roof (2008)
  • Mr. Wellington (children's book, illustrated by Robert Andrew Parker, 2009)
  • Girl by the Road at Night: A Novel of Vietnam (2010)
  • Listening for Ghosts: A Novella and Four Short Stories (2022)

References

Page Template:Reflist/styles.css has no content.

  1. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."David Rabe | Biography, Plays, Movies, & Facts | Britannica".
  2. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."RABE, David (William) 1940-". Encyclopedia.com. Cengage. Retrieved February 1, 2023.
  3. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Bloom, Harold (1994). The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1st ed.). New York, NY: Harcourt Brace. p. 566. ISBN 978-0-15-195747-7.
  4. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."First Blood". catalog.afi.com. Archived from the original on 2021-06-11. Retrieved 2021-06-11.
  5. ^ a b Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Past Awards". New York Drama Critics' Circle. Retrieved 2025-10-19.
  6. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."2014 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for Master American Dramatist". pen.org. 16 April 2014. Retrieved August 1, 2014.
  7. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Ron Charles (July 30, 2014). "Winners of the 2014 PEN Literary Awards". The Washington Post. Retrieved August 1, 2014.
  8. ^ NY Times review

Lua error in mw.title.lua at line 404: bad argument #2 to 'title.new' (unrecognized namespace name 'Portal').

Further reading

  • Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Lahr, John (24 November 2008). "The Critics: Life and Letters: Land of Lost Souls". The New Yorker. Vol. 84, no. 38. pp. 114–120. Retrieved 16 April 2009. "David Rabe's America"
  • Radavich, David. "Collapsing Male Myths: Rabe's Tragicomic Hurlyburly." American Drama 3:1 (Fall 1993): 1–16.
  • Radavich, David. "Rabe, Mamet, Shepard, and Wilson: Mid-American Male Dramatists of the 1970s and '80s." The Midwest Quarterly XLVIII: 3 (Spring 2007): 342–58.

Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'Module:Authority control/config' not found.