Review Roundup: STICKS AND BONES Opens Off-Broadway

David Rabe's Sticks and Bones launches The New Group's 20th Anniversary Season. The play opens tonight, November 6, and plays a limited off-Broadway engagement through December 14 at The New Group at The Pershing Square Signature Center.

Directed by Scott Elliott, this production features Richard Chamberlain as Father Donald, Nadia Gan as Zung, Holly Hunter as Harriet, Morocco Omari as Sergeant Major, Bill Pullman as Ozzie, Ben Schnetzer as David and Raviv Ullman as Rick.

In Rabe's Tony-winning play Sticks and Bones, an average American family is pulled apart by the return of a son from the Vietnam War. Ozzie and his wife Harriet are overjoyed to see their eldest son David again, but the furies that haunt David begin to overwhelm them and their happy-go-lucky younger son Rick, forcing Ozzie to make a stand for the values he can't bear to let go.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Ben Brantley, The New York Times: ...in Scott Elliott's fascinating new production, any professional discomfort felt by him and his cast...feeds the climate of anxiety in which "Sticks and Bones" must exist. This revival annoys, subverts and unnerves in equal measure...As the resident teller of ugly truths, David strangely seems the least complex character, and Mr. Schnetzer looks entirely too hale and hearty to be an oracular death's-head...Mr. Ullman finds exactly the right measure of sinister hostility lurking in his chipper, guitar-strumming Rick; it's a performance balanced on the precipice between sunny caricature and murky depths. Ms. Hunter's fidgety, hyper-happy Harriet adroitly takes the same formula even further, transforming wholesome peppiness into what feels like a neurological disorder. But it's Mr. Pullman who most hauntingly internalizes the corrosive truths that David introduces into the family...he here makes a case for Ozzie as one of the American theater's classic embattled male losers -- a man who finds his masculinity, his vitality and his very existence under siege. His manner, tentative from the beginning, becomes by degrees increasingly unsettled and unmoored.

Jennifer Farrar, Associated Press: Playwright David Rabe...skillfully captured the national malaise of the late 1960s in his caustic drama "Sticks and Bones," about a deliberately war-obtuse America...The New Group has mounted a searing revival that seems as unfortunately relevant as ever...New Group artistic director Scott Elliott has staged the play with careful attention to the simultaneous unraveling of each character as they attempt to obliterate the sorrow David has brought home. Although the play feels too long, it slowly imprints on the audience...Ben Schnetzer oozes disgust and vague menace as David...Rabe has twisted patriarch Ozzie into a paranoid, frightened bigot, and Bill Pullman memorably imbues him with a furtive, weasely persona. Blandly nurturing, food-obsessed mom Harriet is so robotically perky, (an intense, tautly wound portrayal by Holly Hunter), that we almost expect to see a giant key sticking out of her back.

David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter: Watching the New Group's unsettling revival of David Rabe's Sticks and Bones, it's impossible not to flinch at the realization of how confronting this 1971 play must have been to American audiences when it premiered, before official U.S. involvement in Vietnam had even ended. This scalding work scores direct hits on the stubborn obliviousness of the folks back home to the realities of that dirtiest of 20th century wars. The playwright channels raw anger and despair into his depiction of PTSD, and the cluelessness of family, church and community to deal with it in an era before that condition even had a clinical name. It's also no mystery why the still-disturbing play, a top Tony winner in 1972, is so seldom revived. Truth is, it's a hard sit. Despite Scott Elliott's insidiously effective production and riveting performances from Bill Pullman and Holly Hunter, the writing remains very much of its time.

Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal: Merely to describe "Sticks and Bones" is to wince at its banality. The satirical frame that drives the play was already trite in 1971. Today it's a dead metaphor -- American sitcoms long ago replaced the hi-honey-I'm-home euphemism of "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" with knee-jerk cynicism -- and it cheapens what could have been a heartfelt story of a soldier's pain. Indeed, some parts of the play are still effective, especially the monologues in which Ozzie measures the gap between his ineffectual exterior and his inward angst...Mostly, though, it's just crudely obvious. All praise to Scott Elliott, the director, and his cast, who get more out of "Sticks and Bones" than Mr. Rabe put into it. Top honors go to Mr. Pullman, whose scalding performance deserves a better play.

Marilyn Stasio, Variety: The New Group kicks off its 20th anniversary season with a winner: a powerful revival of David Rabe's harrowing 1971 black comedy, "Sticks and Bones." Masterfully helmed by company a.d. Scott Elliott, the production stars Bill Pullman and Holly Hunter (both sensational) as Ozzie and Harriet, savage caricatures of the archetypal all-American mom and dad who are dumbfounded by the transformation of their soldier son who fought in Vietnam and returns home blind. Shocking in its day, the play still packs a mighty emotional wallop.

Linda Winer, Newsday: Wartime disillusionment and rough talk are hardly headlines anymore. But the rarely revived drama...remains an unnerving powerhouse of individual shock therapy and big-picture insight. At least it does in Scott Elliott's painful, exquisitely cast production...Pullman is heartbreaking and hateful as Ozzie, a kind of clueless modern Willy Loman, a figure of such self-loathing and grandiosity that we imagine an animal simultaneously bracing for a beating and preparing to bite. Hunter is equally superb as the woman pinched from the strain of being coquettish and keeping everyone happy. Schnetzer creates a haunting picture of shattered manly ideals...

Adam Feldman, Time Out NY: "You must hear me," implores a blind Vietnam veteran of his middle-aged, middle-American father. "It is only fraud that keeps us sane." This kind of urgency jolts through every vein of the New Group's throbbing revival of Sticks and Bones, David Rabe's seriously twisted 1971 satirical drama...Although Rabe's twist on home invasion is too long by half an hour, it is fascinating to watch...Its subject is not Vietnam per se but a host of American c-words -- complacency, conformism, consumerism, compromise...Director Scott Elliott handles Rabe's challenging tone with finesse, drawing excellent work from his ensemble cast. Pullman gives a full, layered performance as a troubled Everyman, and Hunter is just sensational: hilarious in her tension, tender in her worry, chilling in her bigotry. I wish I could say that Sticks and Stones felt dated, but this revival bruises.

Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News: David Rabe's Vietnam War-era satire "Sticks and Bones" runs pitch-black to blood-red. Credit the intrepid, albeit hit-and-miss, New Group...Four decades haven't been very kind to this work, part two of a war-themed trilogy...This play, while intense, feels bald and dated more often than it does bold and razor-sharp. Quirky and committed performances by director Scott Elliott's star-dusted cast offer some compensation...Although Chamberlain is miscast and stiff, the rest of the cast evokes the right off-kilter atmosphere. Hunter is particularly fascinating as a seemingly model mother who can't conceal that she's as agitated as a shaken Pepsi bottle. That's something -- but not quite enough to make the nearly three-hour show satisfying.

Jason Clark, Entertainment Weekly: David Rabe's blistering Vietnam-era play Sticks and Bones -- currently playing in a galvanizing, brilliant revival... -- is one of those works that can crash and burn at the slightest misappropriation...One false move by any creators can easily tip the play into either silliness, or worse, indifference. Scott Elliott's expertly rendered production...not only fully honors playwright Rabe's adventurous, uncompromised intentions, but quite possibly makes the prose more relevant than ever...The astonishing cast here, though, plumbs depths of zany, deep-seated paranoia that make the outcome more than a series of performed italics: Hunter, tapping back into the whirling-dervish energy that made her a star in early films like Raising Arizona, is a stylized marvel, and her work with Pullman -- already an expert at unveiling the delicacies of difficult material...suggests a duo for the ages...Startlingly, 43 years has not dulled the play's impact in the slightest...

Robert Hofler, The Wrap: Watching the New Group's tough, horrifyingly funny revival of David Rabe's "Sticks and Bones" is like entering an eerie time capsule...Its lasting power, however, derives from something much greater, more universal...What remains harrowing is that Ozzie and Harriet have a son, home from the war, and he is a stranger whom they no longer know but they learn to know well enough in the course of a few days to hate..."Sticks and Bones" runs nearly three hours, and for most of that time Pullman's Ozzie is having one long, grueling nervous breakdown...In an atonal stream of conscious, Pullman's Ozzie never stops exploring his own darker emotions, while Hunter's Harriet remains all staccato, skimming the surface with homilies that turn flat even before the words leave her lips.

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Photo Credit: Monique Carboni

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