Oh Tennessee, Poor Tennessee Kopit's Hung You in the Closet And Won't You Be Mad

The marquees of Broadway may soon have to be enlarged until they stretch out over the Hudson River and poke the New Jersey Palisades; for a new American playwright is about to arrive, and his considerable ability is exceeded only by the length of his titles. At 24, Arthur L. Kopit is scarcely out of Harvard, but he has already shaped his talents on a series of campus productions that included How Sweet the Wine and How Dark the Color, To Dwell in a Palace of Strangers, Sing to Me Through Open Windows, and On the Runway of Life You Never Know What's Coming Off Next. Last week in London, preparing for its presentation next fall in Manhattan, Kopit's first-professional production reached the stage: Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad.

What is remarkable is that Writer Kopit, after using up so much creative energy on his titles, had something left over for the plays themselves. Oh Dad, Poor Dad, described in undergraduate fashion by the playwright himself as "a pseudoclassical tragifarce in a bastard French tradition." shows influences in every scene--from strong, cynical gusts of Jean Anouilh, Marcel Ayme and Jean Giraudoux down to weak, cynical undertones of Elizabeth Taylor: "He's dead. Listen to me. I'm alive." It is a spoof of everything from waltzing toreadors to Tennessee Williams; and like the characters of Williams' The Rose Tattoo, Kopit's people are named with florid symbolism--Madame Rosepettle, Rosalie, Commodore Roseabove, Rosalinda the Fish--but without even the simplest clue to the possible significance of all the roses. Yet the sum of all this is more than derivative lampoon and parody. Full of primary humor and insight, it is cohesively and originally a comic play.

Measuring Yachts. The plot, florid and foolish by turns, concerns Madame Rosepettle and her young son (Andrew Ray), moneyed travelers who ply the international circuit from hotel to hotel, taking with them the stuffed remains of Mr. Rosepettle. A sort of Auntie Maim, Madame Rosepettle also has a cat-eating piranha fish, a couple of man-eating plants and a psychopathic hobby: she stalks lovers on the beaches at night and kicks sand into their faces. She keeps her son locked away from the world to guarantee his presence when she finally decides the direction in which his future greatness lies. Her own occupation is measuring yachts, and she takes a lover who has a particularly impressive craft, only to spurn him with the philosophy that "life, Mr. Rose-above, is a husband hanging from a hook in the closet." The husband's corpse, in the end, falls out of the closet and across the bed where young Jonathan Rosepettle is strangling a seductive baby sitter.

That it all adds up exquisitely to nothing is not the failure but rather the point of the play, which suffers in its London production from the heavy approach of Director Frank Corsaro. who emphasizes the sinister at the expense of the humorously macabre. In her first stage appearance after a dozen years of teaching, Stella Adler didn't seem quite ready for Madame Rosepettle. However, the Times conceded that the play was "hilarious," and the Daily Mail said of Kopit: "He writes like an angel or, to be more precise, like a mischievous cherub who has just had a highly diverting season in hell and is dying to tell all about it."

Electrical Circuit. Whether he is describing a character who is "ugly as a humid day" or a place that is "humming with imbeciles," Arthur Kopit is indeed a writer, and the appeal of his work is in the cutting edge of authenticity with which he hacks his way through phony jungles. Personally soft-spoken and completely unaffected, Kopit is the son of a jewelry salesman, grew up in Lawrence, Long Island. At Harvard on a scholarship, he majored in engineering and learned his playwrighting in the Dunster House Drama Workshop. If his material is bizarre, it is designed with the practical precision of a simple electrical circuit. He may or may not become a first-rate playwright, but he is already one of the theater's better critics. Meanwhile, if New Yorkers were startled to see Broadway theater managers already heading toward the Hudson bearing armfuls of giant letters, it only meant that on the runway of life they seem to sense what's coming off next.

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