‘Sticks and Bones’ with Bill Pullman, Holly Hunter

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. Most war-themed books and plays take a decade or so for their authors to process (i.e., recover from) the experience. But like The Basic Education of Pavlo Hummel and Streamers, the other plays in Rabe’s Vietnam War trilogy, Sticks and Bones was written while this deeply unpopular war (in which the playwright served) was still raging in Indochina. Which surely goes to explain why the emotions feel so raw.