Playwright Arthur Kopit sees truth in lying. Scuffing through Harvard Yard in 1956 after a class in advanced calculus, Kopit had a startling epiphany about the possibilities of lying. He was a 19-year-old freshman from New York intent upon a career in engineering or,...

Anderson, Arthur L. Died peacefully Friday, December 9 2005. Age 82. Beloved husband of Anna Mae. On September 8th they celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. Dear father of Robert (Lissa), Katherine (Frank) Mehnert, William (Carol) and Christine (Marti) Wolever. Proud "Papa" of eleven...

[Man] is a misfit in the present and this condition is reflected in the drama he creates…. One recurrent element in that drama is ritual action. We shall consider such action in three contemporary plays: Genet's The Maids, Triana's The Night of the Assassins, and Kopit's Chamber Music. Belonging respectively to the French, the Spanish-Cuban, and the North American cultures, these plays illustrate in their striking analogies a much talked-about phenomenon: the emergence of a plane...

Kopit's play [The Day The Whores Came Out To Play Tennis] is one act long, as opposed to the four acts of [Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard]. He utilizes only six characters, while the Russian uses sixteen. It necessarily follows that the brevity of the later work precludes the total development to be found in the longer play. The main idea, however, is exactly the same. In Kopit's play the pilot committee of the Cherry Valley Country Club is concerned because a group of whores have taken o...

After the opening of his two new plays, Arthur Kopit was savaged by the press, a development which should surprise nobody familiar with the fickleness of American cultural fashions. Kopit was praised much too quickly on the basis of much too little, and it was inevitable that an angry reaction would set in, not only among those who had originally disliked his first play, but among those who suddenly realized they had overestimated it. On the other hand, Kopit himself is partly responsible for the condescend...