Personal, Cultural, and Aesthetic Identity in the Plays of Arthur Kopit Kyle Bostian
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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 Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] 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. ii 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. ii i 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. iv 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 v 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. vi 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 vii 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