In the subtitle of Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, Kopit nods to the "bastard French tradition," drawing inspiration from the avant-garde dramatists of Paris. Among these, playwrights like Beckett and Ionesco, expatriates themselves, pushed the boundaries of the absurd. The play dives into an exaggerated realm of dysfunctional family dynamics, vividly captured in the toxic relationship between Jonathan and his mother, where her suffocating protectiveness becomes an agent of destruction.

Absurdist Elements

Yet, the play doesn't stop at familial discord; it plunges further into the absurd with its tragic or black farce elements. It conjures surreal, nightmarish visions, from the monstrous, ever-expanding Venus flytraps to the eerily animated corpse of Mr. Rosepettle, which tumbles from its closet at the worst possible moment, only to briefly seize Jonathan's ankle in a grotesque dance of life and death.

In this absurd world, anomalies abound. A cuckoo clock, for instance, operates not by the steady march of time but by the capricious swings of human emotion, echoing the growling Venus flytraps, ravenous piranha, and the whimsically twirling French windows. The narrative dips into realms of pure nonsense, illustrated when Madame Rosepettle whimsically extracts a hammer from her purse or absurdly claims that a 1572 Javanese Yen-Sen, gifted to Jonathan, is the rarest of coins precisely because it was never minted—crafted by her own hands.

Through such absurdist spectacles, Kopit, like his contemporaries, exposes the shortcomings of language and logic. He suggests that these tools, often unreliable, serve more to obscure truth than to unveil it, challenging the very fabric of human communication.

Jonathan Rosepettle is a man shaped by the unrelenting grip of his domineering mother, her suffocating hold sparking a wellspring of obsessive fears within him. As a tragic parody of the obedient son, he remains ensnared in a cocoon of isolation, shielded from a world deemed by his mother as a corrupting menace that would tarnish him into yet another abhorrent male figure. Beneath the surface simmers a repressed wrath against her emasculating dominance, but Jonathan's dread is so profound that his rebellion manifests only through assaults on her pets, proxy targets that, in their primal essence, symbolize her predatory, man-eating nature.

The Commanding Presence of Madame Rosepettle

When Madame Rosepettle strides into the hotel suite, trailed by a troop of bellboys, she commands their attention with the precision of a drill sergeant, her voice dripping with sarcasm as she critiques their perceived faults and slyly hints at their potential dismissal. Her affluence cows them into submission, turning them into a frantic blur akin to Keystone cops, stumbling under her relentless storm of threats and temptations. Though this scene unfolds with comedic flair, it simultaneously serves as a sharp critique of the indifference and lack of civility displayed by the whimsically wealthy, those who wield the power that their riches bestow with little regard for the humanity of those beneath them.

In the Theatre of the Absurd, a familiar feature is the outrageous mockery of death and the deceased, subjects typically handled with the utmost gravity. These plays earn their peculiar title of "tragifarces" due to their irreverent and often madcap approach. In a bizarre twist, Oh Dad emerges as a threnody—a lament for the lost. From the outset, Madame Rosepettle is arrayed in solemn black, accompanying her son beside the coffin of her late husband in what resembles a funeral parade. She carries with her dark drapes, ready to shroud the windows of the master bedroom, where she stashes the remains of Albert Edward Robinson Rosepettle III in...