IN THE BOOM BOOM ROOM
For everyone else out there who can’t imagine a production of In the Boom Boom Room having anything of importance to say to a contemporary audience, Thunder Road will show you something you never thought possible. On the page Boom Boom Room seems a tedious exploration of a well-worn theme: the bright-eyed, good-hearted dreamer sucked dry and left broken by an abusive world (I confess I’ve never been able to finish the script, seeing in it only faux urban lowlifes, condescending guilty-male feminism, and out-of-nowhere gritty poetic monologues). Rabe’s play centers on Chrissy, an unimaginably naive and optimistic go-go dancer who longs to leave Philadelphia and make it as a legitimate dancer in New York. Every man in Chrissy’s life uses her for his own perverse pleasure, from her sexually abusive father to her disturbingly devoted courtier Eric to her insensitive husband Al, yet she can’t even entertain the notion that some men might be genuinely bad.
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Deborah King’s virtuoso performance as Chrissy sends an already strong production into the stratosphere. King acknowledges the stock nature of Chrissy’s character–she even gives her the stereotypical dumb-blond accent reminiscent of Ellen Greene in Little Shop of Horrors (in fact, Greene played Chrissy in Boom Boom Room’s first off-Broadway production). But she also gives Chrissy, who strives to pull herself out of the mire, enormous dignity and a strong moral fiber, and without slipping into sentimentality or bathos. King’s strength onstage is awesome.
