Arthur Kopit

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There has been relatively little scholarly attention paid to the works of playwright Arthur Kopit, with almost nothing written about his entire canon, and most of the criticism that has been published is not very impressive. Furthermore, those critics who attempt an overview of the plays usually devote a fair amount of time to discussing the plays that he wrote as an undergraduate at Harvard. While Sherwood Anderson, Robert E. Sherwood, Eugene O’Neill, and other playwrights have moved from Harvard to Broadway in the past, critical studies of their works have focused on what they wrote as professional playwrights. There are three related reasons that have been used to justify a different approach to Kopit. First, the Harvard plays represent a goodly portion of the author’s output; second, the majority of his later plays have been short and relatively insignificant; and third, as a result of these first two points combined with the reputation established by his major plays, several of the Harvard pieces have been published and are thus easily accessible. Still, his major works are impressive and deserving of critical examination.

Despite the continued popularity among college students of Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, Kopit’s reputation no longer rests solely on this work. With Indians and Wings, he proved his early promise; with his later work, such as Discovery of America and Y2K, his technical skills (in several genres) have served his personal voice to present strong dramatic statements on significant topics. He continues to have fun in the theater, too, experimenting to see whether he can stretch the medium’s dimensions, as was the case with Chad Curtiss, Lost Again, a collection of three ten-minute plays in serial form fashioned after the motion picture serials of the 1910’s through the 1940’s. After David Mamet, Sam Shepard, and Edward Albee, Kopit belongs among the major American playwrights of the late twentieth century.

Sing to Me Through Open Windows

The best of Kopit’s early plays is Sing to Me Through Open Windows. Clearly not meant to be realistic (the set is a bare stage hung with black curtains), the drama is in the tradition of Theater of the Absurd and shows the influence of Samuel Beckett in its setting, language, pauses, minimal plot, and mysterious characters. In spite of Kopit’s statement that Beckett “has had no influence on me as far as I know,” critics have pointed out structural and linguistic resemblances between this play and Beckett’s Fin de partie: Suivi de Acte sans paroles (pr., pb. 1957; Endgame, 1958).

The protagonist of the play is a boy, Andrew Linden, who visits the home of a magician, Ottoman Jud, and his helper, Loveless the Clown, in the middle of a dark forest. Ottoman and the Clown have entertained Andrew on the first day of spring every year for five years. This year, however, Ottoman’s illusions fail, and Andrew is exposed to the games that Ottoman and the Clown play, mysterious games that also prove unsuccessful. This year, too, Andrew announces that he wants to stay with Ottoman, but the announcement is made in the third person, answering a “Distant Voice of Ottoman,” as though the event is being recalled even while the present action continues: “And although I say them, some time later I will ask myself, Now what was it again that you said to him . . . back there? . . . And the boy said yes, he wanted to stay there. . . . I love you, Mr. Jud.”...

(This entire section contains 3552 words.)

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The play ends with Ottoman apparently dead and Andrew gone.

The format of the work combines with its symbolism to depict a transitional moment in life. Memory and the present intermix as Andrew must leave the unworried, love-filled, exciting, circuslike atmosphere of his childhood and move into manhood. Ottoman, a symbolic father figure, is failing, certainly growing old and perhaps even dying (another transition), and while he can put his arm around the boy’s shoulder to encourage him, the youngster must continue his journey through life alone. Symbolically, the time of year during which the action takes place represents hope, birth, and renewal, but it is cold, and snow is falling as the play ends, negating the positive aspects of spring and suggesting the fear that both old man and young man feel as they approach the unknown. Kopit has said that Sing to Me Through Open Windows is “about the necessity of certain things dying to enable certain things to live. It deals with memory and time. . . .”

Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad

Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad caught theatergoing audiences in the United States by surprise, and a summary of the action provides a clue as to why this happened. The three-scene production, subtitled A Pseudoclassical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition, is set in a Caribbean island hotel where Madame Rosepettle, her son Jonathan, two large Venus flytraps, and a cat-eating, talking piranha fish named Rosalinda (after Rosepettle’s husband’s former secretary) are in transit. Also traveling with the family is the stuffed body of Rosepettle’s husband, which is kept in a coffin when traveling and hangs from a hook in Rosepettle’s bedroom closet the rest of the time: “He’s my favorite trophy. I take him with me wherever I go,” she chortles. In scene 1, Rosepettle harangues the bellboys and dominates her son. Scene 2, set two weeks later, brings Jonathan together with a young governess, Rosalie, who tries to seduce him, but who is run off by his mother. One week later, in scene 3, Rosepettle is courted by elderly Commodore Roseabove, but her story of how she brought about her husband’s death (a description that paints men as bestial and women as virginal) unnerves him. She proclaims that her goal in life is to protect her son (he was delivered after a twelve-month term, so she obviously began her campaign early): “My son shall have only Light!” Later, while Rosepettle is out on her habitual round, searching for couples making love on the beach so she can kick sand in their faces, Rosalie returns to try to persuade Jonathan to run off with her, but she is so self-centered and insensitive that her sexual desire arouses only terror in Jonathan. When his father’s corpse falls on them, Rosalie commands, “Forget about your father. Drop your pants on top of him, then you won’t see his face.” The play concludes when Rosepettle returns to find that Jonathan has killed the girl by smothering her.

There are many Freudian and Oedipal overtones to Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, with its theme of a domineering mother and Milquetoast son. The theme is not a new one, having been dealt with in Sidney Howard’s The Silver Cord (pr. 1926, prb. 1927) and later in Harold Pinter’s A Night Out (pr. 1960) and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), yet Kopit’s embroidering of the theme with man-eating plants (symbolic of the emasculating wife/mother), maniacal cuckoo clocks, uncontrollable tape recorders (as in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, pr., pb. 1949), and self-propelled chairs, spiced with a loved one’s body (as in Joe Orton’s Loot, pr. 1965), results in a unique creation.

Some critics claim that Kopit is metaphorically portraying the neurosis brought about by the tensions of the nuclear age. This reading is certainly reinforced by the dramatist’s use of absurdist techniques, though this interpretation is not completely convincing. The play is not really an absurdist play, in spite of Kopit’s use of absurdist techniques—a careful examination of Rosepettle’s dialogue, for example, reveals the psychological realism that underlies the bizarre surface of the action. There are flashes of brilliance in the grotesque humor, but they are not sustained throughout the play. Some critics called the work a satire that mimics avant-garde conventions, while others dismissed it as an unsuccessful example of the Theater of the Absurd. In any case, the play conclusively established Kopit’s theatrical talent.

Indians

After a series of lesser works, Kopit surprised audiences again with Indians, his second major play. Indians fuses the principal themes and techniques of Kopit’s previous works. The conception of the play dates to March, 1966, when Kopit read a statement made by General William Westmoreland, the commander in chief of U.S. forces in Vietnam, regarding incidents in which U.S. soldiers had killed Vietnamese civilians: “Of course innocent people have been killed. In war they always are. And of course our hearts go out to the innocent victims of this.” Realizing that this sentiment could be traced throughout U.S. history, Kopit put Westmoreland’s exact words in the mouth of a character in Indians, Colonel Forsythe, who speaks them while looking over the site on which a group of Indians have been massacred the day before. The casual dismissal of the action is overwhelming. At the moment that he read Westmoreland’s quote, Kopit has recalled, he “was listening to Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony. There are two orchestras playing counterpoint. The orchestras play completely opposing pieces of music based on American Folk songs—‘Shenendoah,’ ‘Columbia the Gem of the Ocean.’ . . . You have this serene, seraphic music based on these folk songs, and then the violent opposition of a marching band drowning it out.” The dramatist admits that when the Westmoreland quote was juxtaposed to the music, “I just sort of went berserk.”

Another ingredient that contributed to the play’s success was the tempering influence of Kopit’s intellectual approach to his material. In both Don Juan in Texas and Across the River and into the Jungle, he had touched on the source of mythic heroes. In Indians, he complemented this interest with research. The emotional content and the research came together in the composition process to create interwoven subtexts: “Most of the scenes in the play are based on real incidents that were then distorted.” For example, Kopit notes, “The scene on the Plains is based upon a famous expedition of the Grand Duke Alexis. Spotted Tail was not killed then, but he could have been.” He goes on to observe that “in a way he was killed; he was made to play the stage Indian for the Grand Duke.”

The play is composed of thirteen scenes, alternating between Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and an 1886 Indian Commission hearing. The extravagant Wild West Show segments illustrate American prejudices, reveal Buffalo Bill’s character, comment on historical events, and develop Kopit’s theme that Americans create heroes through a mythmaking process that lets their society justify the destruction of other less powerful societies. The commission scenes demonstrate how alien the white and Indian societies appear to each other. The whites do not understand why Indians will neither abide by their treaties nor recognize the innate inferiority of their race. The Indians do not understand how the treaties can be valid, since land cannot be owned, and also why, if there are treaties, the whites do not abide by the agreed-upon terms. Neither side understands, respects, or grants dignity to the opposing side.

The conflict between basic cultural instincts is emphasized by the tension between the alternating scenes and epitomized by the contrast between Westmoreland’s words and the noble, moving surrender speech given by Chief Joseph in 1877, which Kopit incorporates into the play twice, the second time as the concluding speech in the play:I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs have been killed. . . . The old men are all dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. The children are freezing. My people, some of them, have fled to the hills and have no food. . . . No one knows where they are—perhaps frozen. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired. My heart is sick and sad! From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more, forever.

For his part, Buffalo Bill is trapped by his own nature, by historical events, and by America’s need to create heroes. He is instrumental in destroying a people and a way of life he admires.

Kopit does not intend his play to be understood on a literal level. The chronology (referred to as a “Chronology for a Dreamer”) that is supplied in the printed version of the play is not the chronology followed in the drama. Spotted Tail rises after his death to make a speech. The opening, in which the figures of Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull are seen as though they are in museum cases, is intended to alert the viewer immediately that the play is not to be taken realistically. Instead, Kopit offers an emotional gestalt, an impressionistic, surreal representation of his theme. By means of a deliberately confusing Brechtian production through which the spectators are made aware of historical processes, the playwright forces them to realize that those processes are human-made, not natural elements, and that they are alterable. The play gets off to a weak start, but after the first three or four scenes, the cumulative effect of Kopit’s dramatic structure begins to build, and the play gathers power as it progresses, each scene taking its strength from the scenes that precede it while simultaneously adding to their impact.

Wings

As impressive as Indians was, Wings was the product of an even more mature dramatist and is probably Kopit’s finest work. Again he combined a strong emotional expression with an intellectual context, and again he relied on the themes and techniques that had served him well in the past, but he explored new material as well. Stylistically there is an impressive distance between the realism of The Questioning of Nick and the impressionism of Wings; there is also an interesting thematic progression from the commonplace subject matter of the early plays to the public, social impulse behind Indians and then to the personal, individual content of Wings.

In the spring of 1976, Kopit’s father suffered a massive stroke that rendered him incapable of speech. This event became the source of Wings’s emotional content. During his visits to the Burke Rehabilitation Center in White Plains, New York, as he explains in a Shavian preface to the published script, Kopit formulated what became the operative or controlling questions for the play, going beyond a mere exploration of the problems of communication and of the nature of language: “To what extent was [his father] still intact? To what extent was he aware of what had befallen him? What was it like inside?” In addition to his father, the dramatist observed several other patients, on whom the protagonist, Emily Stilson, was to be modeled. Kopit not only became involved in trying to convey what it would be like to undergo the personal and terrifying catastrophe of a stroke but also began examining the nature of identity and of reality itself, for to the disoriented victim, reality is confused and unverifiable, and the resultant terror must be faced in virtual isolation.

To supplement his own observations, Kopit once more turned to exhaustive research. The published text of the play has an epigraph from Charles Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis (1953), which describes the pilot’s feeling of being cut off and unsure of what is real; ironically, the feeling is similar to that experienced by a stroke victim, and Lindbergh’s words are later echoed in Emily’s dialogue. Kopit also drew on two books concerning brain damage, Howard Gardner’s The Shattered Mind (1975) and A. R. Luria’s The Man with a Shattered World (1972), and on the experience of the center’s therapist, Jacqueline Doolittle, herself a former stroke victim.

The effective representation of the mind of the victim is what sets this drama apart from most of its contemporaries and supplies a strength that would be missing if the playwright had adopted a documentary approach. The ninety-minute play moves from fragmentation to integration, a movement synchronized with stage effects—live and recorded sound, colored and flashing lights, shifting points of view, a minimal set conveying a sense of limbo, overlapping dialogue, loudspeakers situated throughout the theater, and other such devices, which exercise the potential of the theater to the maximum.

The play is open-ended in that it comes to no climax or conclusion. Performed without intermission, it is composed of four segments. In “Prelude,” Emily suffers her stroke. In “Catastrophe,” she realizes that something has happened, but she cannot determine what or identify her status. “Awakening” traces Emily’s transition from a total lack of understanding to the dawning of understanding. In “Explorations,” the final segment, she begins to sort out her identity and starts to appreciate the significance of her condition. Although these states of being are distinct, the person progressively experiencing them cannot perceive either edge of the transition, a condition that Kopit reproduces nicely while still managing to maintain a sense of Emily’s gradual reconstruction of her personality and of reality itself.

The dramatist’s careful combination of logic and nonsense, of articulate speech and babble, parallels his stage effects to depict an extraordinary, nonverbal sequence of events. There is not much action in Wings, and what there is seems confusing and unstructured. The audience, however, soon becomes deeply involved with Emily; tension is created not by dramatic action, but by the audience’s effort to decipher what is happening in the play and what is real, and by their concern for Emily. The charge that Wings is not interesting because it lacks sufficient rising action is similar to the criticism leveled against Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (pr., pb. 1956) and is equally invalid. Wings is not meant to entertain superficially in the way that Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly (pr., pb. 1979) or Neil Simon’s plays do; like Long Day’s Journey into Night, it sheds light on the perennial human condition.

Bone-the-Fish

Road to Nirvana (1990) was originally titled Bone-the-Fish and was in part a spoof of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow. The play premiered at the 1989 Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, where it created quite a stir. A harshly satirical look at Hollywood and the motion picture industry (and the world of business in general, as well as religion and other topics ripe for the picking), the drama was filled with humor and spectacle—a starlet is carried onstage on a litter, much as Cleopatra was. Still, the work was so offensive to some (a Hollywood wannabe is forced to eat “nunshit” in a test to see if he qualifies to join the ranks of the industry’s depraved arbiters of artistic taste) that it was deemed over the top. Like Henry Moore’s readers of an earlier generation, the audience was so put off by the excesses in form that they were unable to appreciate the substance (the nature of art and the artists and the relationship between art and commerce, for instance).

Y2K

Y2K (later retitled BecauseHeCan), like Road to Nirvana, was first staged at the Humana Festival. Theater critics from around the world voted the drama the best play at the 1999 festival. The title plays off the fear of universal chaos and the crashing of computers that was predicted to arrive with the new millennium because not all computer programs were designed to recognize the change from 1999 to 2000 (potentially reacting instead as though the new year were 1900, thus invalidating critical operations).

Although this thriller, with a plot out of Franz Kafka or George Orwell, has been compared to John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation (pr., pb. 1990) and Craig Lucas’s Dying Gaul (pr. 1999), its theme is the erosion of personal privacy. Joseph Elliott, a Random House art books editor, and his wife, Joanne, an appraiser at Sotheby’s, are enjoying their upscale life in a Manhattan apartment when they experience a phenomenon that is becoming a national crisis—the invasion of their private lives by a computer stalker, Costa Astrakhan. The comfort of their modernistic Park Avenue home, which is dominated by a huge Hanz Klein painting, is destroyed by a man who boasts that he can reach into their lives at any time because he is “everywhere”: “On the outskirts of your mind, in the ether, in the darkness.”

Stylistically, the use of hacker jargon helps keep the audience slightly off balance, as does the awareness that the issue of deteriorating privacy applies not just to this nice couple but to the audience as well. The Elliotts learn that computers can control their lives and that their computer illiteracy makes them vulnerable to cyber geeks who can take over their bank accounts—and their lives. Y2K is a thriller that insists that paranoia can be based on reality. The chilling fact that the drama ends without a resolution leaves the audience as entrapped and vulnerable as the play’s protagonists.