The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel by David Rabe

First published: 1973

First produced: 1971, at the Shakespeare Festival Public Theater, New York City

Type of plot: Expressionist

Time of work: 1965-1967

Locale: Georgia, New York, and Vietnam

Principal Characters:

• Pavlo Hummel, a Vietnam-era American soldier
• Yen, a Vietnamese prostitute
• Ardell, a black soldier fantasized by Hummel
• First Sergeant Tower, a drill sergeant in boot camp
• Sergeant Wall, a middle-aged army sergeant in Vietnam

The Play

The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel opens in a Vietnamese bar. American pop music blares from the radio while Pavlo Hummel, a young soldier dressed in army fatigues and wearing sunglasses, boasts of his fighting ability and of his girlfriend Joanna back home. Yen, a prostitute, and her Mamasan watch as a grenade is tossed into the bar, and Pavlo picks it up just before it explodes onstage.

In the aftermath of the explosion, a black soldier named Ardell abruptly appears upstage and calls Hummel to attention, questioning him in military style about his identity and his feelings. The apparent reality of the Vietnamese bar is replaced by expressionist scenes from the Georgia boot camp where Hummel had received eight weeks of basic training. A group of trainees join Hummel and Ardell onstage; the set now exhibits a drill instructor’s tower manned by a black man, Sergeant Tower. Although he remembers catching the grenade and asks if he is dead, Hummel still runs to join the other trainees when he hears the sergeant call, plunging into his own past as the part of him that is Ardell (“You black on the inside”) observes and comments.

The language of boot camp, bellowed by Sergeant Tower and repeated by the trainees of Echo Company, ironically reflects the sexism and racism that have become basic to training military personnel in the United States. Hummel, however, is never quite in step. While the training scenes reveal the common Pavlovian programming suggested by his first name, the innocent peculiarity of Hummel (whose surname means “bumblebee”) is revealed in interspersed barracks scenes. The first of these finds him with fellow trainees Kress and Parker, who label Hummel as stupid and weird; they are not impressed with his attempts to appear streetwise by inventing stories of a criminal uncle and a past of car theft. While Hummel’s squad leader, Pierce, often intervenes in these scenes to restore order, he too informs Hummel, “you ain’t Regular Army.”

Hummel’s lies open him to accusations of theft in the next barracks scene; further harassment, especially by Kress, reveals that Hummel is also sexually innocent. When he is assigned to clean the dayroom, Hummel listens to war tales from a corporal with actual experience in Vietnam. He admires the reported ability of a Sarge Tinden to know intuitively when an apparently innocent old man and child are loaded with dynamite and must be shot on sight. This attitude is reinforced as the company shouts that the spirit of the bayonet is “TO KILL!”

The next barracks scene reveals that Kress has failed the proficiency test and will have to repeat basic training, and Hummel does not miss the opportunity to get even with his tormentor through a mocking speech. Their resulting fight is ended by Pierce, and Hummel then attempts suicide in his bunk by sniffing airplane glue and swallowing a bottle of aspirin. The scene freezes as Pierce once again comes to his aid, and act 1 ends as Ardell orchestrates a ritualistic costuming of Hummel in a clean uniform. Hummel is passively transformed, while Ardell’s monologue reveals the similarities between successful military training and other social programming (“doffin’ his red cap, sayin’, ’Yes, Massa’”) and confirms the loss of individuality in such uniformity (“That ain’t no Pavlo Hummel. Noooo, man. That somebody else”).

Act 2 opens with the same military background, complete with the tower and soldiers in formation, while Mickey, Hummel’s brother, appears downstage to represent the New York setting for Hummel’s trip home before Vietnam duty. Mickey echoes Kress and Parker as he accuses his brother of “doin’ that weird stuff again” and rejects the same lies, which Hummel has revised to fit his army experience. Their brief conversation before Mickey leaves on a date reveals that Pavlo does not know who his father is and that his girlfriend, Joanna, married while he was gone and is now pregnant. Upstage marching chants by Sergeant Tower and the recruits contrast the heroic soldier image with Hummel’s disappointing reality. His reunion with his mother fails to add any warmth; her monologue on another mother’s loss of her son in Vietnam foreshadows Hummel’s own doom, while her unwillingness to give Pavlo anything beyond a motion-picture image of a father robs him of any alternative to the army image of manhood.

In Vietnam, Hummel is assigned as a medic to the Twenty-third Field Hospital despite his preference for infantry. As the scene shifts, bar music and the entrance of Yen on one side of the stage announce a return to Vietnam while Hummel dons jungle fatigues. The bed of Brisbey, a soldier who has lost his limbs, except one arm, to a land mine, is rolled onto the other side of the stage to establish the hospital locale. Hummel is accosted from both sides: He is offered Yen’s sexual favors and begged by Brisbey to help him die. Meanwhile, the ubiquitous troops and Sergeant Tower pantomime a rifle drill.

When Hummel applies for a transfer to squad duty, the captain accuses him of wanting to be killed. As they talk, the audience watches the wounding of a young black soldier, who calls for a medic repeatedly until two Viet Cong soldiers kill him. As he binds the dead body to his back to carry it off, Hummel is also attacked and wounded. He survives, however, and when Sergeant Tower calls, Hummel ignores warnings by Ardell and returns to combat.

This time Hummel repeatedly shoots a Vietnamese farmer and is then hit himself. When he calls for help, Ardell tells him, “When you shot into his head, you hit into your own head, fool!” This incident makes Hummel remember an experience as a twelve-year-old when he almost drowned: “I was all confused, you see, fighting to get down, thinking it was up.”

Hummel, wounded three times, wants to go home. Instead, he is awarded a Purple Heart and sent back. Entering the bar, he finds Sergeant Wall seducing Yen and attacks him, again giving the speech which began the play. Thus, the time of memory is over; the deadly grenade is thrown by an angry Sergeant Wall. As Hummel dies, Ardell’s monologue informs the audience of the details of his funeral. Pavlo died with no words, but to Ardell he repeatedly cries “Shit!” and ends the play echoing the marching songs of Sergeant Tower: “Ain’t no matter what you do . . . Jody done it . . . all to you. . . .”

Dramatic Devices

The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel uses expressionist techniques to re-create the inner turmoil of Pavlo Hummel on the stage, while maintaining an almost naturalistic treatment of the Vietnam War through dialogue and character portrayal. One expressionist device is apparent in the symbolic names, such as Sergeant Tower, Sergeant Wall, the prostitute Yen, and Hummel himself. Thematically, naturalism is reflected in the physical motivations of sex and survival governing most of the characters; the settings, however suggestively staged, are also naturalistic. For example, at one point minimalist staging allows the reality of the Vietnamese bar to be suggested on one side of the stage and the field hospital on the other, while upstage center is dominated by the sergeant’s tower and soldier formations, which establish the ongoing influence of basic training on Hummel. Each scene is established by the characters associated with the place and by dialogue appropriate to their setting. Consequently, while the play actually takes place in Hummel’s mind—his life flashing past him as he dies—the audience is also graphically experiencing the realities of the war.

Contrasting with the realistic dialogue of these war experiences is the repetitive shouting by Sergeant Tower and others by which the basic tenets of the “regular army” image are expressed. Actual marching and training chants reveal the blatant racism and sexism with which Hummel learns to perceive the world. Traditional values are undermined when the violent potential of rifles and bayonets becomes linguistically sanctified as the spirit of the weapons; stupidity, too, is validated as the men sing, “IF I HAD A LOWER I.Q./ I COULD BE A SERGEANT TOO!”

The techniques of repeating and shouting orders are sometimes employed as well in the monologues of Ardell, the surrealistic projection of Hummel’s inner self, as he tries to penetrate that training and enable Pavlo to understand himself better. Ardell is not the only one who occasionally speaks in lengthy monologues; those of Pavlo himself and particularly those of Mrs. Hummel reveal the isolation of each character, their inability to communicate with others.

The creation of Ardell allows Hummel to continue a dramatic dialogue with himself, and the expansion of his dying moments allows him to trace his memories and try to discover what has brought him to his death. The fragmentation of place within the unifying abstraction of the United States Army allows him to make connections between home, army, and war front experiences. In other words, David Rabe has destroyed the Aristotelian unities of character, time, and place onstage so that he can make the stage a creation of Hummel’s memories.

Critical Context

The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel uses many of the techniques of postmodernist drama to explore its themes. Originally produced in 1971, this play reflects the anger of the agitprop playwrights of the 1960’s. Its language also connects the play with such absurdists as Harold Pinter and Edward Albee: Communication fails even when it is attempted, while seemingly meaningless words symbolically communicate the irrational patterns of contemporary life. The minimal realistic staging is reminiscent of the symbolism of Tennessee Williams, while the graphic naturalism of character and dialogue recalls Eugene O’Neill’s plays. The darkness of David Rabe’s vision suggests as well the existentialist drama of the time.

Joined with Sticks and Bones (pr. 1969) and Streamers (pr. 1976) in what has been called Rabe’s Vietnam trilogy, only The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel takes the audience to Vietnam, although each of the three offers penetrating analyses of American society and contemporary life in or out of war. While this play was recognized immediately as important to Americans’ understanding of the Vietnam experience, only since Streamers finished the trilogy have critics appreciated Rabe’s more encompassing purpose and acknowledged that his bleak vision of contemporary life did not end with the war. His implicit attack on social programming is extended to the socialization of women in In the Boom Boom Room (pr. 1974), while the violent and impossible demands put upon individuals by social institutions are offered a universal context in The Orphan (pr. 1973) by paralleling Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458 b.c.e.; English translation, 1777) to twentieth century atrocities such as the My Lai massacre and the Manson family murders. Still, it was with The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel that a new talent eager to expand the stylistic possibilities of theater and to examine the concerns of the contemporary world was recognized and awarded the Obie Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the award of the Variety Critics Poll. As the twentieth century drew to a close, Rabe continued to explore his predominant theme of protagonists undergoing initiation rites and experiencing moral conflicts in screenplays for The Firm (1989) and Casualties of War (1993) and in his 1997 play A Question of Mercy.

Sources for Further Study

Asahina, Robert. “The Basic Training of American Playwrights: Theater and the Vietnam War.” Theater 9 (Spring, 1978): 30-37.

Biedler, Philip D. “In the Middle Range, 1970-1975.” In American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982.

Herman, William. “When the Battle’s Lost and Won: David Rabe.” In Understanding Contemporary American Drama. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987.

Hertzbach, Janet S. “The Plays of David Rabe: A World of Streamers.” In Essays on Contemporary American Drama, edited by Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim. Munich: M. Hueber, 1981.

Marranca, Bonnie. “David Rabe’s Vietnam Trilogy.” Canadian Theatre Review 14 (1977): 86-92.

Phillips, Jerrold A. “Descent into the Abyss: The Plays of David Rabe.” West Virginia University Philological Papers 25 (February, 1979): 108-117.

Savran, David. “David Rabe.” In In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988.

Simard, Rodney. “David Rabe: Subjective Realist.” In Postmodern Drama: Contemporary Playwrights in America and Britain. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984.