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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