The Rape of the Sabine Men

The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis is a surrealistic love set: Arthur Kopit 6, Drama 0. Flashy and cute rather than craftsmanlike, Playwright Kopit lobs up pseudo profundities that he avoided in his fanciful Oh Dad, Poor Dad romp. The dramatic penury of the current play may be suggested by the fact that it relies for its climax on an offstage sound effect of prepubescent outhouse humor.

Five members of a Jewish country club sit in the clubhouse nursery querulously debating how to get rid of 18 unseen prostitutes who have infiltrated the tennis courts. It becomes apparent that the members are either vulgar or epicene, and need a supercilious, tuxedo-skinned British barman to insult and be insulted by. The two sons present would like the two fathers present to drop dead. When the girls express their contempt by simultaneously breaking wind and then pelt the place with tennis balls, plaster spills, roof beams totter, and it becomes clear that Kopit is one of the cosmic jokesmiths who want playgoers to read books of revelation between the wisecracks. What Tennis may portend is that self-contained worlds, either private clubs or entire civilizations, invite and perhaps deserve destruction. Nevertheless, the play is more like the rape of the Sabine men, that stock modern American stage theme in which weak men are ravished and ravaged by strong women.

At random moments when Kopit tosses his thinking cap away for vaudeville, the play generates iotas of fun. One such moment of visual glee is the sight of gifted Second City Alumnus Anthony Holland apoplectically disgorging a tennis ball that has lodged between his teeth.

Tennis is preceded by an opaque little fable called Sing to Me Through Open Windows. It is done in the key of flat.

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