Land of Lost Souls.

On the wall of David Rabe's television room, at his home in Connecticut, is a photograph of him as a football player at Loras Academy, the Catholic high school in Dubuque, Iowa, where he was a hard-driving running back and linebacker; in the image, he is being tackled, pushed into the dirt by three opponents. Rabe, now a large, white-haired sixty-eight-year-old with an athlete's body and a writer's stoop, writes the way he used to run: at full tilt, instinctively feeling for an opening, then plunging forward into the unknown. "I get a sentence, an idea, an image, and I start," he said. "I don't know anything beyond it. I follow it." Rabe's theatrical universe is at once vivid and mysterious, a pageant and a puzzle, where his bemused characters glimpse only the barest outline of what one of them calls "the unrelenting havoc" in which they flounder. "Often my characters don't know what the issues of the play are," Rabe told Bomb magazine in 2005. "They think they're doing one thing but something else is actually orchestrating their lives." Even Rabe can take some time to fathom what's going on between his characters. Of his four plays set during the Vietnam War, "Streamers" (currently in revival, in a Roundabout Theatre Company production) was begun first--soon after he was discharged, in 1967, from the Army's 68th Medical Group--and was finished last, in 1975. "My way seems to be to work, move on, and then go back," he said in the Bomb interview. " 'Streamers' . . . came out in three periods of writing consisting of four or five hours at each sitting, but these sittings were spread out over seven years."

In his writing, Rabe--who has produced a wide-ranging body of distinguished drama (four of his twelve plays have been nominated for Tony Awards, and "Sticks and Bones" won one, in 1972), four finely wrought film adaptations ("Casualties of War," "Streamers," "Hurlyburly," "I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can"), and three works of fiction--plays a primal game; his goal, he has said, is to show how "the past hangs on to you and shows up in spooky ways." He is obsessed with the things that haunt us. "People carry those things like physical realities almost," he told me. "They have a definite weight to them." Rabe's daringly stylized dramas hover in the realms between the natural and the metaphorical: angels mediate for the dead; a blinded Vietnam vet comes home to his TV-sitcom parents, Ozzie and Harriet; a gangland caper is played out in "an apartment in the underworld." Rabe's work is a challenge to what he calls the "clockwork universe, clockwork play," in which "certain motions delivered certain consequences in a predictable proportionate way." "What I was after is more like nuclear fission in which the explosion of something minuscule unlooses catastrophic, ungovernable devastation," he wrote in a 1992 afterword to some of his plays.

Rabe's explorations of the psyche mine rasa, a concept found in Sanskrit literature, which he defines as "the life thing"--the startling, underground anarchy of the unknown. Soldiers and psychopaths, gods and gangsters, icons and executives parade through his dramas--all, in their unique, vernacular way, eloquent in their unknowing. "Whatsa matter with me?" says Chrissy, a go-go girl in "In the Boom Boom Room" (1972), whose search for her authentic self strands her at a strip club, a masked, topless receptacle for other people's projections. "What'd I do that for?" Phil, a psychopathic ex-con turned actor, asks another palooka, in "Those the River Keeps," the 1991 prequel to "Hurlyburly." Just out of prison, Phil has punched and killed a dog that urinated on his hand while he was sleeping. After he hits it, the dog "gets this look . . . like he has been asked a question the likes of which he has never heard of it before and he ain't got a chance in hell of gettin' it right," Phil says. In the face of life's blows, Rabe's characters register a similar traumatized incredulity. His America is a dim and brutalizing landscape of the lost, not so much a "moronic inferno" as "an epic fucking fog," to quote Eddie, the master of "Hurlyburly" 's toxic ceremonies.

For Rabe, the drama between the surface and the subterranean began in Dubuque, in a blue-collar district near the Mississippi River. In the cramped quarters that he shared with his parents and, later, his younger sister, Marsha, there was, according to Marsha, "a tremendous lack of emotional, physical, psychological privacy." She added, "We had to have a lot of inner life, 'cause there wasn't much room for outer life." Rabe's father, William, slept on a pull-out sofa in the living room; ...