Arthur Kopit, on his birthday May 10
Songs of absurdist protest, enactments of social satire drawn from his models Moliere and Chekov, incantations of revolutionary struggle and the usetting of applecarts, Arthur Kopit's theatre of confrontation directly challenges structures of power and priviledge. Hilarious rather than grim, his existentialist-absurdist comedy is unforgettable and a treasure which harkens back to Aristophanies.
His masterpieces of world theatre include The Day The Whores Came Out To Play Tennis , a master-servant class struggle and revision of Anton Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard, lots more fun than The Communist Manifesto.
Chamber Music, another one act play, is a brilliant satire of patriarchy and among his greatest works. In our current ideological environment driven by The Handmaid's Tale and its televised public catharsis and the disruptive change agent that is the #metoo movement it seems newly relevant and powerful. A crusade led by the outrageous warrior nun and escaped prisoner-slave Rose McGowan as our Joan of Arc- no, haven't written that one yet. Or is it a real thing, historical and verifiable, living beyond the mirror of dreams? And how do the realms of the Ideal and the Real inform and shape each other? As with Arthur Kopit's works, the confusion of signs and their referents creates an obfuscation of meaning, opens pathways, shifts boundaries, liberates audiences. To watch or to read is to participate.
Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad is a stellar debut and a phenomenol success story which established his reputation alongside Edward Albee, and led to his work being classified as Absurdist and comparable to Ionesco and Beckett.
And finally we have the work which had the greatest impact on our society as a force of change, Indians. a magnificent antiwar play interweaving the Vietnam War and the Indian Wars and set in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. This play is part of a huge and mainly unproduced masterwork of several plays revisioning American history which includes The Discovery of America and Lewis and Clark: Lost and Found.
Beyond these four indisputable Great Works which everyone should read and see performed, through which he has tilted with a quaternity of evil windmills that might be giants, there are the gorgeous musicals High Society (a tribute to Cole Porter), Phantom, and Nine (Fellini's 8 1/2 moved from the 1960's to the 1920-30's and referential to the myth of Casanova), and the existentialist Y2K in which our machine servants replace us and we become counterfeits of ourselves, as if Philip K. Dick and Sartre were trying to escape the Otherworld together through his dreams, pursued by Kafka in his terrifying Gregor Samsa form.