SOURCE: Wade, Les. “David Rabe and the Female Figure: The Body in the Boom Boom Room.” Text and Performance Quarterly 12, no. 1 (January 1992): 40-53.

In the following essay, Wade provides a feminist interpretation of In the Boom Boom Room, focusing on the equivocal implications of the closing scene of the play.

Although few would argue that In the Boom Boom Room is David Rabe's best work, the play's closing image is as provocative and compelling as any found in his celebrated Vietnam War plays. The power and success of this closing lie less in Rabe's mastery of dialogue or characterization than in his simple deployment of the lead actor, who, in the role of Chrissy, concludes the play with an erotic dance, one she performs in mask, with bikini briefs and bare breasts. This scene proves the crowning stroke of Rabe's rhetorical agenda, which indicts male hegemony (he quotes...