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): 40–52.

In the following essay, Wade discusses Rabe's use of a nude female dancer at the end of In the Boom Boom Room and its significance both to the play and to varied members of the audience.

The closing scene of David Rabe's play In the Boom Boom Room employs a female nude in its rhetorical attack on sexism; the principal character resigns herself to the emotional and economic pressures of the male dominated order and appears finally on stage as a topless dancer. Although Rabe's play clearly evinces a didactic aspect, one that argues for female advancement, the work may reproduce the oppression it repudiates. The play's formal style and structure may involve an element of subjection, whereby the female figure experiences a textual appropriation. Nonetheless...