Shallow Soul in Depth

By T. E. Kalem

BOOM BOOM ROOM

by DAVID RABE

Boom Boom Room belongs to the modern mode of encounter drama. As a kind of existential soap opera it could be retitled "Chrissy Bumps into Life." Chrissy (Madeline Kahn) is a dumb, pitiable, wistful lump of humanity. She encounters people who, if they were objects, would be found rusting away in the town dump. It is the fashionable conviction of many young playwrights, including David Rabe, that the planet is currently populated by lesbians, homosexuals, sadistic drunks, incestuous fathers, maternal vultures and men with the ingrained instincts of rapists.

Chrissy meets them all. She, of course, is a character symbolically known as "poor little me"--alone, afraid and searching for identity ("I got no self). In the end, she opts for the nihilistic anonymity of being a topless go-go dancer in a big city.

On the basis of this evidence it would be easy to kiss off the play as just another sample of faddist effluvia. But Rabe has more gravity and force than that, as he has shown in his Viet Nam plays, Sticks and Bones and The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. He has a wildly exhilarating, surrealistic humor that has not been exhibited in the U.S. theater since Edward Albee wrote The Sandbox, Zoo Story and An American Dream. He has a painful awareness of familial alienation, a kind of psychic wound that will not heal. His last play, a disaster, was significantly titled The Orphan. Finally there is a sense of vocation about the man, that sturdy-ox effort and noble seriousness that O'Neill brought to the task of fashioning drama.

This last quality has inspired his cast. Everyone is splendid, and Madeline Kahn gives a performance in depth of an intrinsically shallow soul that is almost certain to net her a Tony Award nomination. What animates the new theater management at Manhattan's Lincoln Center--whose first production this is -- is love of the U.S. playwright, especially the young playwright of promise in his tough apprenticeship years. In offering that nourishing brand of love, Lincoln Center's new producer Joseph Papp has no peer.

qed T. E. Kalem

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