[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...

There is no difficulty of judgment where [a] lack of talent is transparent. Trouble arises when a piece reveals some flair yet settles for facile, complacent strokes of theatre. Such a play is Arthur Kopit's "Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet, and I'm Feelin' So Sad." The very title proclaims the author's shrewdness at attracting attention. But his cleverness goes beyond the invention of a provocative label.

The language of the mind losing hold of words as it drifts off to sleep was first explored by Joyce in Ulysses at the end of the Ithaca episode. But it was Beckett who, in his plays and novels, evoked states bordering on, or representing, aphasia, albeit not literally reproducing clinical cases. Kopit pushes farther in that direction [in Wings], but for all his research into and re-creation of actual defective speech by patients, he too keeps the verbiage within literary boundaries. Thus the work's m...

"The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis" … is a farce about the invasion of a Jewish country club by eighteen of the tennis players. (p. 146) The play is Mr. Kopit's first major entry since "Oh Dad, Poor Dad." There is no plot. Again he makes use of all kinds of old movie and burlesque stunts for his effects…. The tone of the comedy is more mocking than satirical (at least, I could see no indication that Mr. Kopit wants to change or do away with Jewish co...

What I respect in the Kopit double bill of one-acters [Sing to Me Through Open Windows and The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis] is that these "absurd" playlets are trickily disguised confessions, impersonal expressions of what is essentially personal. (p. 373) [One] may think of the brief Sing To Me Through Open Windows … as a boy's memory of a lost "father," whether "he" be a person, a way of life or a dream of the theatre's magic. This ...