Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad

Born in New York, Kopit won a scholarship to Harvard University to study electrical engineering but found that his main interest was playwriting. Shortly after graduation, he wrote Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad (1960), an absurdist play about an overprotective mother who travels not only with her son, but show more with two Venus's-flytraps and the remains of her husband, in an obvious parody of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer. Indians (1969), a more ambitious play, depicts in epic style Buffalo Bill who, caught in an ambivalent position between the government and the Indians, comes to represent both the nemesis of the American Indian and the untroubled American conscience. Wings (1978) concerns a former aviatrix and stunt pilot who suffers a stroke and gradually regains language and, through it, contact with the world. Kopit has also written the book for the successful musical Nine (1983) and adapted Ibsen's Ghosts for Liv Ullman. Gautam Dasgupta has observed of Kopit, "Like the absurdists before him, he chooses to depict a horrific world where logic holds no sway." (Bowker Author Biography) show less