Holly Hunter, Ben Schnetzer, and Raviv Ullman in Sticks and Bones. via
I began to believe that I no longer wished to be a theater critic about halfway through David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones, revived for reasons mysterious by Scott Elliott at the Pershing Square Signature Center. When most of the audience actually returned from the intermission—masochistically eager to subject themselves to another ninety minutes of this relentlessly pretentious twaddle rather than do the rational thing and seek out cocktails or one of those Men in Black memory-eraser devices—I resolved to leave New York entirely. When they stood and cheered manically at the event’s conclusion—not because it had concluded, but because they had deceived themselves into believing that they had seen a play—I made a mental note to begin exploring careers in hermitage.
I have so often found myself tempted to write that such-and-such a production is the worst thing I have ever seen on a stage that I began to fear I was making the phrase into a personal cliché. I am therefore relieved to write that Sticks and Bones is not the worst thing I have seen purporting to be a work of drama: That distinction still belongs to the Public Theater’s production of something alleging to be William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (The New Criterion, October 2014) that began with a supine paean to New York City’s new Sandinista mayor, Bill de Blasio, and quickly degenerated—it is possible to