TWA for Friday, March 10, 2017

Upgrade to paid

“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

CLICK HERE

You’re a free subscriber to The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor. Your financial support is used to maintain these newsletters, websites, and archive. Support can be made through our garrisonkeillor.com store, by check to Prairie Home Productions P.O. Box 2090, Minneapolis, MN 55402, or by clicking the SUBSCRIBE button. This financial support is not tax deductible.

Upgrade to paid

© 2023 Garrison Keillor
P.O. Box 2090, Minneapolis, MN 55402
Unsubscribe