With his earlier plays—The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, and In the Boom Boom Room—David Rabe established himself as one of America's leading young playwrights. Streamers is his most powerful and successful play.

Set in an army barracks in the early days of the Vietnam War, Streamers has electrified audiences from its first performance with its explosive portrayal of a handful of soldiers and their fatally intertwined destinies...Richie, a wealthy neurotic who cannot resist temptation...Billy, an earnest midwestern straight arrow...Roger, a street-wise refugee from the ghetto...Carlyle, a pathological misfit who threatens the order and the substance of their lives...and Sergeants Cokes and Rooney, two aging dipsomaniacal soldiers whose grimly humorous song (about parachutes that fail to open) gives the play both its title and its fundamentally compassionate tone:

Beautiful streamer,
Open for me,
The sky is above me,
But no canopy.

Streamers is a classic of the American theater.