TWA for Friday, March 10, 2017
“Revival” by Luci Shaw from What the Light Was Like. © Word Farm, 2006.
ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2017
It’s the birthday of playwright and novelist David Rabe, born in Dubuque, Iowa (1940). He was drafted and sent to Vietnam. He didn’t actually fight — he worked in a hospital unit and did paperwork. He said: “Barriers were down; restrictions were down; behavior outside the norms. There was this giddy thing. You could go around one corner and see something horrible, around another and see something thrilling. It was a little like the Wild West.”
After his discharge, he went back to grad school. He said: “Something in the army experience had knocked out of me whatever was tying me up and inhibiting writing. I found I didn’t have the patience to write prose. But plays would overtake me, almost explode out of me.”
He wrote a trilogy of plays about Vietnam: The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971), Sticks and Bones (1969), and Streamers (1976). Sticks and Bones is the story of a blind Vietnam veteran who comes home to a family who does not understand him anymore — his parents are named Ozzie and Harriet, a nod to a popular sitcom. Sticks and Bones won the Tony Award for best play.
His most recent play is Visiting Edna (2016)
David Rabe said: “I get a sentence, an idea, an image, and I start. I don’t know anything beyond it. I follow it.”
On this day in 1959, 300,000 Tibetans surrounded the Dalai Lama’s palace in an uprising to protest China’s nearly decade-long occupation. The Dalai Lama had been invited by China to attend a theatrical performance in Beijing, but suspicions grew when China requested that the holy leader travel without his usual bodyguards. Fearing his abduction, a wall of protesters kept him at the palace. Despite their efforts, he had to be evacuated to India a short time later. Following his departure, tens of thousands of Tibetan rebels — men, women, and children — were killed on-site by Chinese military. Monasteries were destroyed, and the Dalai Lama’s remaining guards were executed. Many who remained followed the Dalai Lama to India, where he has since established a government-in-exile in the Himalayan mountains.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
RELEASE WEEK - March 7th That Time of Year: A Minnesota Life (slightly revised) Softcover
