SOURCE: Zinman, Toby Silverman. “What's Wrong with This Picture?: David Rabe's Comic-Strip Plays.” In Modern Dramatists: A Casebook of Major British, Irish, and American Playwrights, edited by Kimball King, pp. 229-39. New York: Routledge, 2001.

In the following essay, Zinman suggests that the characters in Rabe's plays are similar to cardboard cutouts and comic-strip characters in the vein of Roy Lichtenstein's paintings.

There is something oddly anachronistic in David Rabe's radically contemporary plays, but his use of anachronism is neither the conventional reference to something too modern for its context, nor the reverse, the nostalgic drift of so much contemporary art; it creates, rather, a puzzling and powerful distantiation.

Rabe's sort of anachronism is perfectly expressed by Phil in Hurlyburly:

ARTIE:

This is sex we're talking about now, Phil. Competitive sex. 

PHIL:

That's what I'm saying. I need help. 

ARTIE:

You're such a jerk-off, you're such a goof-off. … I...