Dec 21, 2009
Arthur Lee Kopit was born in New York City on May 10, 1937, son to George and Maxine Dobin Kopit. He grew up in Lawrence, on Long Island, where his father worked as a jewelry sales manager. After graduating high school in 1955, he entered Harvard University on an engineering scholarship; but he was also interested in the arts, and after his first year he became involved in Harvard’s Dunster House Drama Workshop. He had seven of his plays produced there, directing six of them himself and winning two playwriting prizes. He graduated from Harvard cum laude in 1959.
Kopit’s earliest professional works—mostly oneacts— were parodies and tragicomic or black farces, prefiguring the play which solidified his reputation, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (1960). After being staged at Harvard and a local commercial theater and later in London, Oh Dad began a New York run of 454 performances at the Phoenix Theatre on February 26, 1962. The play subsequently enjoyed a successful tour of the United States and Europe.
On the basis of Oh Dad, critics identified Kopit as a promising absurdist playwright, a judgment that, given Kopit’s great diversity, proved to be both premature and too restrictive a label. With the bow Arthur Kopit of Indians, first produced in London by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1968, Kopit gave notice that his work defied categorization. A protest play, Indians simultaneously debunks the American myths created to vindicate both the massacre of native Americans and the Vietnam War using Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show as its central metaphor.
Again, with Wings (1978), Kopit demonstrated that he was too much an innovator to be bound to a particular dramatic movement or subgenre. The work first appeared as a radio play, from research undertaken after Kopit’s father had a debilitating stroke. It was refashioned for the stage, becoming what many consider the writer’s best and most original work. It is almost a monologue, a dramatization of a stroke victim’s inner struggle to cope with the loss of coherent speech. Concurrent with his work on Wings, Kopit began teaching as a playwright in residence, first at Wesleyan and thereafter at other universities in New York and New England.
Throughout his career, Kopit has shown that he is one of the most careful and deliberate craftsmen in the American theater. He is also one of its most inventive and far-ranging playwrights. In addition to a variety of stage plays, many of which reflect an abiding interest in history and contemporary social problems, he has written librettos for musicals and diverse works for radio and television, including documentary mini-series. His grants and awards include a Vernon Rice Award (1962), Outer Circle Award (1962), American Academy Award (1971), CBS Fellowship (1976), Italia Prize (1979), and an Antionette (Tony) Perry Award (1982).
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