Personal, Cultural, and Aesthetic Identity in the Plays of Arthur Kopit

280 Pages·2015·2.19 MB·English

by  Kyle Bostian

Florida State University Libraries
Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School
2003
The Art of Immortality: Personal, Cultural,
and Aesthetic Identity in the Plays of Arthur
Kopit
Kyle Bostian
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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF THEATRE
THE ART OF IMMORTALITY:
PERSONAL, CULTURAL, AND AESTHETIC IDENTITY
IN THE PLAYS OF ARTHUR KOPIT
By
KYLE BOSTIAN
A Dissertation submitted to the
School of Theatre
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Awarded:
Spring Semester, 2003
Copyright © 2003
Kyle Bostian
All Rights Reserved
The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Kyle Bostian defended on
7 April, 2003.
John Degen
Professor Directing Dissertation
Karen Laughlin
Outside Committee Member
Carrie Sandahl
Committee Member
The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above-named committee
members.
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To my grandfathers: Carey, the original Doctor Bostian and an incomparable academic
role model; and Harry Johnson, whose formal education ended in the eighth grade but
whose love for knowledge has been inspirational.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Arthur Kopit, not only for creating the works, but also for so openly sharing his process;
the FSU Office of Graduate Studies, for a research grant that made possible my trip to
New York City to interview the playwright; John Degen and Carrie Sandahl, for their
very different but both just right approaches to guiding the project; and Tiffany Wilhelm,
a true partner, for her inexhaustible support in every regard throughout the experience.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract..........................................................................................................................vi
Preface: The Case for Kopit...........................................................................................vii
INTRODUCTION: THE CONSTRUCTION OF SELF
IN A CHAOTIC WORLD ...................................................................................1
1. AN ABSURD FORM OF AMERICAN TRADITION: PSYCHOLOGICAL
(IN)DETERMINISM IN OH DAD, POOR DAD, MAMMA’S HUNG YOU
IN THE CLOSET AND I’M FEELIN’ SO SAD...................................................36
2. MAKING THE MYTH OF AMERICA’S DESTINY MANIFEST:
THE DISEASED FEAR OF “DYIN’ WRONG” IN INDIANS...........................68
3. “FLYING BLIND” INTO THE POSTMODERN HEREAFTER:
A STROKE OF PERSONAL HOPE IN WINGS..............................................110
4. DETECTING AMERICAN MADness: THE ILL LOGIC
OF NOT BELIEVING WHAT WE KNOW IN
END OF THE WORLD WITH SYMPOSIUM TO FOLLOW.............................134
5. THE ROAD TO EL DORADO IS A ROAD TO EMASCULATION:
IMMOR(T)ALITY, HOLLYWOOD-STYLE, IN ROAD TO NIRVANA..........175
6. MILLENNIUM APPROACHES POST(MODERN)HASTE:
THE CYBER(PAN)OPTIC VISION OF BecauseHeCan.................................205
CONCLUSION: DISCOVERING AMERICA ...
THEN AND NOW...........................................................................................239
APPENDIX: HUMAN SUBJECTS RESEARCH APPROVAL LETTER...................258
REFERENCES............................................................................................................259
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.......................................................................................268
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ABSTRACT
Arthur Kopit’s plays express what I believe to be the dominant cultural anxiety of
the latter half of the 20th century: the conflict between the human need for order and
meaning and our existence in a chaotic and fragmented world. The playwright’s works
depict the traumatic impact of this conflict on people both individually and collectively;
at the bottom of the dilemma is the human inability to accept our inevitable mortality.
Kopit’s plays also express deep cultural anxieties of their particular social moment.
Reductively summarized, the causes of those anxieties are family dysfunction (Oh Dad,
Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad – 1960), the
Vietnam War (Indians – 1969), aging and disability (Wings – 1978), nuclear proliferation
(End of the World With Symposium to Follow – 1987), obsessive materialism (Road to
Nirvana – 1991), and technological invasions of privacy (BecauseHeCan – 2000).
Kopit’s works feature breakdowns in personal identity (through characters and
action), cultural identity (through themes and settings), and aesthetic identity (through
formal elements). At the heart of those breakdowns are the identity components of
“commemoration” (memory, history/myth, artistic tradition), perception, and language.
Ultimately, those components prove to be insufficient bases for identity – but the only
ones available. The playwright puts his protagonists into crises that call into question
their senses of self. Those crises expand from the personal to the cultural by virtue of
their context in the turbulent late 20th-century U.S. society; individuals in crisis become
emblematic of “America” in crisis. And the form reinforces this content. Each play
combines and distorts established genres, techniques, and/or other works in ways that
break down their aesthetic identities. Further, the theatrical effect of each play parallels
the experience undergone by the characters, so that the causes – and cultural dimensions
– of their personal crises are felt firsthand by audience members. Kopit’s oeuvre thus
provides tremendous insight into the complexities of existence in the contemporary age.
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PREFACE
THE CASE FOR KOPIT
There is no book devoted exclusively to the plays of Arthur Kopit. I believe that
the absence of such a volume reflects serious scholarly oversight. For over forty years,
Kopit has balanced the competing demands that American theatre makes on playwrights
to compose works possessing both commercial viability and artistic merit. His career has
been marked by productions on Broadway and by prestigious off-Broadway and regional
companies, often involving prominent theatre artists. The two most commonly offered
explanations for the prevailing critical disregard for Kopit – his small number of plays
and his stylistic variety – are superficial barriers to appreciating his work fully. They are
not legitimate reasons to consider his oeuvre less important than those of contemporaries
such as Sam Shepard, David Mamet, or Edward Albee.
The Accomplishments
Kopit is perhaps still most famous for his satirically absurd breakthrough play Oh
Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad. Aside from
its memorable title, that work – written by the recent Harvard graduate (with a degree in
electrical engineering!) and produced in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1960, then in
London and New York over the following two years – garnered both the Vernon Rice
Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award. Since making such an auspicious debut,
Kopit has achieved several other notable theatrical triumphs. He was the librettist for the
Tony Award-winning Best Musical Nine (1982), and he was both a Tony Award nominee
for Best Play and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Indians in 1970 and Wings in 1978;
the original radio version of the latter won the Italia Prize. In addition, he has received a
Shaw Traveling Fellowship (1959), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1967), an American
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Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1971), a National Endowment for the Arts Grant
(1974), and two Rockefeller Grants (1968 and 1977).
Although such honors have eluded Kopit in recent years, his work remains in
demand. His most recent major plays, Road to Nirvana and BecauseHeCan, were each
written under commission by the Actors Theatre of Louisville for the Humana Festival, in
1989 and 1999, respectively. But ATL is not the only producing organization to have
solicited Kopit’s work. Wings originally was penned for National Public Radio’s Earplay
series in 1977 and then adapted for the Yale Repertory Theatre. A translation of Ibsen’s
Ghosts was commissioned by the Kennedy Center and staged at the Brooks Atkinson
Theatre in 1982. End of the World With Symposium to Follow (first produced in 1984 at
the Kennedy Center) was written under private commission. And Discovery of America
has been developed through a series of commissions from the Mark Taper Forum, the
Pioneer Theatre, where it had a reading in conjunction with the 2002 Winter Olympics,
and Theatre Emory in Atlanta, where it had a workshop production in October 2002. In
addition, Secrets of the Rich (unpublished) was selected for a workshop at the Eugene
O’Neill Theatre Center’s National Playwrights Conference in 1976. Kopit’s plays have
been produced by the American Repertory Theatre, Arena Stage, Circle Repertory
Company, Manhattan Theatre Club, the McCarter Theatre, the New York Shakespeare
Festival’s Public Theatre, the Phoenix Theatre, and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Equally notable is the roster of respected theatre artists who have worked on early
productions of Kopit’s plays. It includes directors Jerome Robbins (Oh Dad ...), Jack
Gelber and Gene Frankel (Indians), John Madden (Wings), Tommy Tune (Nine), and
Harold Prince and Richard Foreman (End of the World ...). Among the actors are Stella
Adler, Jo Van Fleet, Austin Pendleton, and Barbara Harris (Oh Dad ...), Sam Waterston
(Oh Dad ... and Indians), Stacy Keach and Charles Durning (Indians), Raul Julia (Indians
and Nine), Joseph Chaikan (Sing to Me Through Open Windows), Constance Cummings
(Wings), Liv Ullman, John Neville, and Kevin Spacey (translation of Ghosts), John Shea,
Barnard Hughes, and Linda Hunt (End of the World ...), Joseph Ragno, Julianne Moore,
Peter Riegert, and Amy Aquino (Road to Nirvana), and James Naughton and Patricia
Kalember (BecauseHeCan). A revival of a revised Nine in the spring of 2003 will feature
Antonio Banderas, Chita Rivera, and Jane Krakowski.
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Kopit is also a sought-after playwriting teacher. He has held long-term faculty
posts at the Yale School of Drama (as a CBS Fellow), the City College of New York, and
Hunter College and served temporary stints at Wesleyan (as Playwright-in-Residence
through a Center for the Humanities Fellowship), Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton. He
has led workshops at many other schools across the country as well.
The Existing Scholarship
Despite this impressive résumé, Kopit remains underrepresented in the critical
literature. I already have mentioned that there is no book on his plays. Doris Auerbach’s
Sam Shepard, Arthur Kopit, and the Off Broadway Theatre, in which slightly over one
third of the text – 45 out of 128 pages – is devoted to Kopit, offers the most substantial
published survey of his work to date. Articles that take a holistic view of Kopit’s career
include Jürgen Wolter’s “Arthur Kopit: Dreams and Nightmares,” Suzanne Burgoyne
Dieckman and Richard Brayshaw’s “Wings, Watchers, and Windows: Imprisonment in
the Plays of Arthur Kopit,” and a chapter by Gautam Dasgupta in American Playwrights:
A Critical Survey. All of these, including the Auerbach book, were published in the early
1980s and do not encompass the plays that Kopit has written since Wings. And by virtue
of their limited space, none provides a sufficiently comprehensive analysis of the work.
A similar trend exists among the articles on individual plays. While the recent
appearance of BecauseHeCan makes the lack of scholarship on that work understandable
(and even inevitable), there is a shocking paucity of criticism on Road to Nirvana and
End of the World .... The latter is the subject of only two published essays, the former of
none. The sole Kopit play with a considerable body of criticism about it is Indians.
There are several unpublished dissertations and theses that address Kopit, but most limit
their discussions to a single chapter or a single play, usually Oh Dad ... or Indians.
In early 2000, a “casebook” on Kopit, edited by Stephen Watt and Kimball King
for Garland Publishing, was cancelled several months after its anticipated release date. In
light of the above, one must wonder if the study was withdrawn due to lack of interest,
and if so, why? What about Kopit’s work lends it to being disregarded by scholars? Is it
possible that it truly does not merit more attention than it has received?
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