Contents: IntroductionPlot Summary Characters Themes Critical Overview Criticism Sources Further Reading |
Style
Setting
Although the immediate setting of Oh Dad is an elegant suite in a luxurious resort hotel, the exotic sounds and lights of the world outside invade the room and suggest both an exotic and romantic atmosphere. It is the world of Port Royale, the Caribbean city that exists only in fantasy. The location throbs with the sounds of a life denied to Jonathan, who is locked away from it.
The light, music, and other sounds awaken in Jonathan some primitive longings. Madame Rosepettle’s warping influence on his psyche has been so total, however, that he is terrified at the prospect of doing anything more than watching life pass by him from a distance. She intends to keep in a world of “light,” beyond “the world of darkness,” the “sex-driven, dirt-washed waste of cannibals eating each other up while they’re pretending they’re kissing.”
Absurdism
Although in part a parody, Kopit’s play also makes use of absurdist drama. For example, language falters, making communication difficult, particularly for Jonathan, who stammers and stutters his way through the play. Characters are also dysfunctional and exaggerated types. Madame Rosepettle is a monster of maternalism, for example, while Jonathan, her victim, is a hyperbolic bundle of inhibitions and fears. There is also an irreverent treatment of serious matters, especially love and death. Havoc is played with logic as well, when, for example, the stuffed body of Jonathan’s father momentarily comes to life, or when the Venus flytraps start growing at an unnatural rate.
Black Humor
A specific quality of much absurdism in both drama and fiction is black humor, evoked in places in which grotesque elements commingle with serious concerns — especially death. The bellboys who carry in the coffin of Madame Rosepettle’s dead husband comically pull its handles off and drop it on the floor, and later, while Rosalie is attempting to seduce Jonathan, Rosepettle’s corpse becomes a macabre Jack-in-the-box, interrupting the seduction by falling twice from the closet on top of the pair.
Parody
Kopit parodies other playwrights in Oh Dad, especially Tennessee Williams. Madame Rosepettle’s long confessional in the third scene is a send up of confessionals made by tormented females in Williams’s plays — Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, for example. In his bizarre use of “rose” in all the characters’ names, including Rosalinda, the fish, Kopit also takes comic swipes at another Williams play, The Rose Tattoo. Presumably, Kopit is also taking an irreverent swipe at the heavy-handed Freudian underpinnings of much realistic drama, especially Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956).
Femme Fatale
Rosalie is a comically distorted familiar type, the femme fatale, a female character who brings misfortune, often death, to men. Rosalie attempts to seduce Jonathan, an ironically fatal enterprise, as it ends up costing Rosalie — not Jonathan — her life. She is bundled in the robes of girlish innocence, a frilly, pink party dress that suggests that she is a young innocent; this presentation is comic misdirection, since, as she finally admits to Jonathan, she has already had many sexual encounters.
Grotesque
Among the grotesque elements of Oh Dad is Madame Rosepettle’s menagerie of pets. These are not warm and cuddly animals but rather malicious creatures, like the piranha Rosalinda, that eat such traditional pets. Rosalinda’s favorite meal is a fresh Siamese kitten. The other pets, two large Venus flytraps, grow enough in size to threaten Jonathan or any other man — much like Madame Rosepettle herself. These omnivorous pets seem ideally suited to the woman, for, metaphorically speaking, she is on a mission to chew up and spit out any male she meets.
Pathetic Fallacy
Madame Rosepettle’s pets are animated and endowed with human-like responses, expressing a consciousness of what is happening around them.
For example, the Venus fly traps growl and bob and weave like fighters when Jonathan tries to cut them to pieces with an axe. When he turns the axe on the mocking, giggling Rosalinda, the fish screams in terror. Even Madame Rosepettle’s dictaphone comes to life on its own when Jonathan jars the table on which it rests, issuing a “strange noise” before “speaking” in Madame Rosepettle’s voice.
Satire
Through the two main characters in Oh Dad, Madame Rosepettle and her son, Jonathan, Kopit satirizes the sexual mores of what the avant garde in the early- 1960s viewed as an “uptight” America. Both are bizarre exaggerations. Madame Rosepettle is the chaste and moral matron turned into an emasculating monster, while Jonathan is the protected son reduced to a neurotic mess, full of inhibiting fears of natural desires. They provide a mordant commentary on middle-class, sexual morality, and the destructive potential of such trappings.
Symbolism
Kopit’s play is rife with symbolism. Madame Rosepettle’s pets are vivid representations of the woman’s omnivorous nature. Just as the pets literally devour living things, the Madame symbolically devours men; she has more than likely killed her husband, and she has “devoured” any shred of independence that Jonathan may have had. The recurrent use of the word “rose” in many characters’ names also serves an ironic, symbolic purpose. A rose is typically associated with love and purity. Yet none of the characters named after the flower are even remotely connected to such concepts. Rosalie, while making a superficial attempt to appear pure, is actually something of a sullied tramp. Commodore Roseabove, while professing to “love” the Madame, is really after sex. Rosalinda, the piranha, is a carnivorous killer of cuddly kittens. And Madame Rosepettle, whose name most explicitly evokes the flower (“rose” “petal”), exhibits behavior in direct contrast to the common ideals associated with the rose.
