David Rabe and the female figure: The body in the boom boom room

Abstract

The closing scene of David Rate'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, Rabe's play works oppositionally in that the nude actor may also incite a kind of disruption. In Chrissy's go‐go dance, the fictive (signified) component of the character is suppressed and displaced by the material (signifier) aspect of the performer's own body—this phenomenon may promise the overthrow of textual authority and the expression of female agency. This essay in essence explores the equivocal implications of Chrissy's enactment...