Ever since Rabe finished up the Vietnam-drama phase of his career, he's mostly been focusing on male anxiety. If the cokehead macho creeps in Hurlyburly teeter close to the edge of paranoia, the characters in Goose and Tomtom and Those the River Keeps plunge headlong over the edge into fantasy, taking the stage world and the audience along for the ride. And so it goes with Cosmologies . But this mystery is soon solved. Richard metamorphoses into various incarnations of the brutal, castrating father, walking around with his fly open for most of the play, repeatedly threatening to beat Erik to a pulp, and doing it every half hour or so.
All comic hell breaks loose.
A meal turns into an Ionesco play. Pages get ripped out of books. Father and son duel with phallic segments of a mail-order telescope. Endless props and foodstuffs get pulled out of a refrigerator. It's hard to tell how much of this is from the playwright and how much is the invention of the director.