Arthur Kopit, the avant-garde playwright who propelled Off Broadway into a new era with the absurd satirical farce “Oh, daddy, poor daddy, mommy hung you up in the closet and I’m feeling so sad” and received two Tony Award nominations totally different, “Indians” and “Wings”, and the musical “Nine”, died on Friday at their Manhattan home. He was 83 years old.
His death was announced by a spokesman, Rick Miramontez, who did not specify the cause.
In 1962, when “Oh Dad, Poor Dad” debuted at the Phoenix Theater with 300 seats on East 74th Street, American popular culture was changing. Julie Andrews was between the idealistic “Camelot” and the healthy “Mary Poppins”; Lenny Bruce, the hot comedian of the moment, was known for what came to be called “sick humor”. Broadway was dominated by “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and “A Man for All Seasons”.
Along came a 24-year-old playwright with a script about an older woman who liked to travel with her virginal adult son and her husband’s preserved corpse. The New York Times critic Howard Taubman had reservations – he called it “funny” and “stage-worthy” but “meaningless” – but he won the Drama Desk Award (then the Vernon Rice Award) and was even transferred to Broadway for a few months in 1963.
There was often a strong disagreement about Mr. Kopit’s work. Before “Indians” (1969) – a dream production that positioned Buffalo Bill Cody as the first guilty American liberal and highlighted his 19th century Wild West show – reached Broadway, there was a production in London, where the critical reaction was decidedly mixed. The script included the rape of one Native American and the casual murder (for sport) of another.
Clive Barnes, writing for The Times, called the Broadway production, starring Stacy Keach, “a mild triumph” and praised Kopit for “trying to do something practically nobody has done before: the multilinear epic”. But Walter Kerr, his colleague at the Times, compared this to “bad burlesque”.
John Lahr, writing for The Village Voice, summed up “Indians” as “never less than sparkling” and called it “the most sounding and utterly theatrical Broadway play of this decade”. “Indians” received three nominations for Tony, including the best play.
Mr. Kopit professed a very specific social conscience. “I am not concerned in the play with the dire situation of the Indians now – they have been liquidated since the moment the first white man arrived,” he told a London newspaper in 1968. “What I want to show you is a series of confrontations between two alien systems. ”Many saw parallels to the Vietnam War, then at its height.
When Kopit returned to Broadway a decade later, his subject could not be more different. “Wings”, which debuted at the Public Theater in 1978 and moved to Broadway the following year, followed the journey of a 70-year-old woman (played by Constance Cummings) having a stroke and reacting to it with fear, determination and kaleidoscopy confusion verbal. As The Washington Post reported, when the main character is asked to repeat the phrase “We live across the street from the school”, she replies: “Malacats na forturay are the secret facts of the novelists”.
Richard Eder of The Times called “Wings”, which was inspired by Mr. Kopit’s stepfather’s post-stroke rehabilitation experiences, “brilliant work” – “complex at first sight”, he wrote, “but totally lucid, written with great sensitivity and with the thrill of a journey of discovery. ”
The piece was nominated for three Tonys. Ms. Cummings won the Tony and Drama Desk awards for best actress and an Obie for her performance.
Mr. Kopit discovered his gift for writing plays almost by accident. In a 2007 interview with The Harvard Gazette, the official news outlet for his alma mater, he looked back and saw his initial reaction when he switched from short stories to screenplays.
“I was having a lot of problems with the narrative point of view,” he recalled. “When I wrote a play, I found that I lost myself as Arthur Kopit and just wrote what the characters said. I was nowhere in the play and I liked that.
Arthur Lee Koenig was born on May 10, 1937, in Manhattan, the son of Henry Koenig, an advertising salesman, and Maxine (Dubin) Koenig. His parents divorced when he was 2, and his mother’s occupation was listed in the 1940 census as a headgear model. He adopted his stepfather’s name after his mother married George Kopit, a jewelry sales executive.
Arthur grew up and attended high school in Lawrence, a thriving Long Island community. He was already writing when he left Harvard in 1959 with an engineering degree. When he started a postgraduate scholarship in Europe, he heard about a playwriting competition at Harvard. He wrote, entered and won the $ 250 prize with “Oh Dad”, which he said he never believed to have any commercial potential.
Mr. Kopit at first liked long-winded and inconsistent titles. “Oh, Dad, poor dad, Mom hung you up in the closet and I’m feeling so sad” even had a subtitle: “A pseudo-classic tragifarce in a bastard French tradition.” He followed that success with a collection of unique acts, including “The day prostitutes went out to play tennis”, set in a suburban country club. “On the catwalk of life, you never know what will happen next” was another initial work.
His last nomination for Tony was for the book of the musical “Nove” (1982), based on the film “8½” by Federico Fellini. That same year, he adapted Ibsen’s book “Ghosts” for a Broadway revival.
Mr. Kopit was a full-fledged celebrity writer, so his later plays received considerable publicity, but were unsuccessful. “End of the World,” about a playwright struggling with a script on the nuclear arms race, ran for less than a month in 1984, despite a relatively stellar cast and guidance from Harold Prince.
The wrong time complicated some later efforts. He and songwriter and lyricist Maury Yeston, with whom he collaborated on “Nine”, began working in 1983 on an operetta-style adaptation of “The Phantom of the Opera”. But before finishing, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s version was a hit in London and debuted on Broadway at the Majestic Theater – where he celebrated his 32nd birthday just before the pandemic ended Broadway.
Investors came out of “Phantom”, as the Kopit-Yeston version became known, but it was transformed into a television miniseries in 1990, made its debut on the Houston stage in 1991 and had over a thousand productions worldwide. Yeston once called it “the greatest hit ever made on Broadway”.
In a statement on Saturday, Yeston called Kopit “one of the most uncompromisingly original writers America has ever produced”.
Kopit’s “Y2K” (1999) was about a wealthy New York couple whose identities were stolen by a young hacker. The title, a term used in numerous headlines, referred to the widespread fear that the beginning of the year 2000 would confuse computer calendars to the point of making planes fall from the sky. When that didn’t happen, Mr. Kopit changed the name of the play to “Because he can”. In the meantime, Peter Marks’ criticism in the Times declared the Off Broadway staging “dark and tedious”.
Over the years, Mr. Kopit has taught writing at Yale, Wesleyan and City College in New York.
His final credit on Broadway was the book for a 1998 theatrical version of Cole Porter’s musical “High Society”, based on “The Philadelphia Story”.
Mr. Kopit married Leslie Garis, a third generation writer, in 1968. She survived him, as did two children, Alex and Ben; a daughter, Kat Kopit; three grandchildren; and a sister, Susan Mann.
Mr. Kopit seemed to be proud of being obscure. After presenting a new work at a 1970s playwrights conference in Connecticut, he was informed that some points were confusing. He replied: “If you had fully understood, I would have failed”.