Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (Criticism)

Criticism

John W. Fiero

Fiero is a retired Ph. D. and former teacher of drama and playwriting at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. In this essay he examines Oh Dad as parodic satire using the techniques of what Kopit himself, in the play’s subtitle, called “a bastard French tradition.”

More than any other commercially successful American play identified with the Theatre of the Absurd, Arthur Kopit’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad exemplifies a widely-held belief among experimental playwrights: the social and political climate of America in the early- 1960s was inhospitable to the reputed nihilism underlying the tragic farces of European playwrights of the absurd like Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, and Eugene Ionesco. What was clearly missing in the post-World War II American consciousness was the pervasive existential despair and pessimism left in the wake of the war’s death and destruction — a condition from which the civilian United States was largely insulated but from which most Europeans had been unable to escape or hide.

Although not expressed in such terms, that view seems to lie behind much of the criticism directed at American artists influenced by the European avant garde. For Richard Gilman, writing in Commonweal, what distinguished “the absurd from the merely foolish” was, in the final analysis, a sense of the absurd “in a metaphysical and not just a behavioral sense.” Kopit’s Oh Dad seemed to exemplify the problem for some early commentators, who claimed that although the playwright successfully aped the manner of the “bastard French tradition” in the play, he did so superficially, achieving form without substance, shock without meaning, and laughter without reflection. The New Republic’s Robert Brustein, for example, opined that Kopit merely evidenced “a desire to join a parade rather than to communicate a unique vision,” a deficiency that tended only “to reduce the Absurd to the ridiculous.”

The point, to a degree, is justly made. The world most often evoked by European absurdists, especially Beckett and Ionesco, is either a desolate or senseless world or sometimes both, as it is in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952) and Endgame (1957). In this world, humanity seems like it is being herded towards the mass grave of an extermination camp, where naked bodies are dumped to tumble over each other like discarded manikins. It is a world in which life or death become indifferent choices, for it is less a world than a spiritual void, one in which, as in Ionesco’s The Lesson (1950), authority has devolved into a mere exercise of brutal, dehumanizing, and meaningless power exercised over and over.

Kopit’s Oh Dad does seem far removed from that sort of apocalyptic vision. Still, the playwright never indicated that his purpose in constructing the play was to present such a world. Moreover, he does not try to convey a sense that the world that he does create is the world, that it is a microcosmic representation of humanity’s common plight in a purposeless universe. He simply uses absurdist techniques in a parody that approaches burlesque — though a parody deliberately more of manner than of matter. His purpose is not in the least metaphysical; it is, first and foremost, satirical. That was Kopit’s choice, and it seems only fair to approach his work on his own terms.

And Oh Dad is pungent and savage satire. Madame Rosepettle is almost pure caricature, a monster mother who turns her child into a neurotic bundle of fears that bar any progress he might otherwise make towards maturity. She is an outrageous, otherworldly character, but she is very, very funny. Furthermore, Kopit’s lack of metaphysical concerns not withstanding, in the figures of Madame Rosepettle and Jonathan as well as the plot of Oh Dad the playwright does in truth address at least some of the same thematic concerns of first-generation Theatre of the Absurd writers. As Doris Auerbach pointed out in Sam Shepard, Arthur Kopit, and the Off Broadway Theater, like Ionesco, Kopit spoofs the tendency of social-thesis drama to lean too heavily on psychological plausibility and confirms that language is more often than not a barrier to human communication.

Like Arthur Adamov, another bona fide charter member of the Theatre of the Absurd, the playwright also attacks the overly-protective mother who tries to keep her son from experiencing a mature, sexual relationship with a member of the opposite sex. Kopit rolls two stereotypes into the single figure of the widow Rosepettle, however, for she is also a frigid, castrating bitch goddess, incapable of any normal kind of love. Her favorite pastime, besides measuring yachts (a blatant symbol for the male genitalia she wishes to destroy), is to patrol resort beaches with a large flashlight to find lovers to annoy by kicking sand on them. She despises sex as something dirty and unwholesome, and, if she could, she would rid the world of its blight. Her strategy in Jonathan’s case is to frustrate his procreative instincts by keeping the nasty world of sex beyond locked doors and filling his mind with her poisonous ideas.

Kopit uses parody trenchantly, depicting the destructive effect of such excessive parental control and violent anti-sexuality through hilarious exaggeration.

Yet it is precisely this hilarity that gives some critics pause in considering the play. There is about Oh Dad a comic gusto that blunted and disguised the work’s serious assault on the American Mom, a figure that since the 1960s has been roasted to pieces, even in the holiest of holies, television sitcoms (see Peg Bundy, the inept nurturer of Married with Children). When Kopit took on the maternal archetype in 1960, she still had her sacrosanct image largely in tact, modern psychology (ie, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s Oedipal theories) notwithstanding.

The result seems to have been a discomforting uneasiness in the laughter Kopit evoked in his play. Somehow it did not seem quite right to find Madame Rosepettle and her antics as funny as they appear. Some reviewers even seemed guilty of some critical misdirection, finding the chief fun in the play in its spectacle and giving almost exclusive credit to the production cast and technicians for the play’s popular success. Gilman, for example, while admitting that the staged play had “engaging moments,” claimed that they were “more a matter of performances and decor than of any intrinsic excellence.” “Verbally,” for the critic, the play had “almost no existence at all.”

A playwright’s contributions to a play are not limited to its words, however. Kopit’s imaginative vision included all the major non-verbal elements and special effects. These, clearly tied to his text, are not a production staffs invention. Furthermore, they have a definite organic function, particularly Madame Rosepettle’s bizarre pets — an outlandish extension of the woman’s own all-consuming nature; the pets are omnivores ready to pounce on and devour any victim, including Jonathan. The creatures are not present simply “to hide the thinness and immaturity of the play,” as Brustein claimed. Moreover, as Harold Clurman argued in the Nation, the shocking subject — the castrating, overly-protective mother — is blunted by being “masked in extravagant paradox, magical (visual) stage tricks and festively macabre color.”

The play, after all, is not just parody and satire, it is also a nightmarish fantasy with many surrealistic elements. There is even a cartoon quality to the work, at least until Madame Rosepettle begins her rambling confessional to the Commodore in the last scene of the play. The action even seems “framed” by the play’s non-verbal elements: the garish, psychedelic colors that intrude from outside with neon intensity and the exotic music with its primitive beat that suggests a torrid world beyond the cage in which Jonathan is held, a virtual prisoner of his mother’s misanthropy.

The action, always bordering on lunacy, also has a cartoon-like illogicality. Things happen for which there is no plausible explanation. There is, for example, the body of Mr. Rosepettle, that falls from the master bedroom closet at the most inopportune moment, not just once but twice, and then, briefly but conveniently (or perhaps inconveniently), seems to come to life, strangely reanimated. Coffin handles and door knobs come off and a chair suddenly moves from under a would-be sitter as if some puckish and invisible gremlin were playing devious tricks for its own perverse delight.

Most of all, there is the animation of nonhuman entities: the Venus flytraps, Rosalinda the piranha, a cuckoo clock, and even windows frames. In their behavior, they all exhibit human traits. For example, in the last scene, quite inexplicably, the plants start expanding, growing from flytraps into mantraps trying to snatch and devour Jonathan. Here and elsewhere probability simply goes by the boards, as it always has in the loony-bin world of cartoons and, it should be added, in the absurd world of Ionesco, at least in a play such as Amedee, or How to Get Rid of It (1954), a play in which a corpse expands and threatens to shove the living characters into the wings.

As Auerbach noted, these cartoon elements offer a “perfect parody” of an absurdist strategy, the tendency to externalize inner, subconscious realities in outward projections exhibiting the irrationality of dream and fantasy, much in the manner of surrealism. Rosalinda and the plants, argued Auerbach, “concretize the dangers of maternal love and the unresolved Oedipal conflict.”

Kopit may have had no metaphysical row to hoe in Oh Dad, but he did have a serious purpose. In “The Vital Matter of Environment,” an article he wrote for Theatre Arts before the play opened in London in 1961, he lamented the fact that the American playwright had to work in a “creative environment” that was inimical to innovation. Moreover, he insisted that theater in America had “been singularly outstanding in its inability to assimilate traditions,” unlike theater in Europe.

In creating Oh Dad, Kopit was attempting to assimilate the new tradition of the European avant garde, fitting it to a theme relevant to his own creative environment. He was also countering what he called “a Puritan-influenced attitude toward the theatre” in America, the strong current against which the Off-Broadway, alternative theater movement was resolutely moving.

It is ironic that the prevalent American optimism of the early- 1960s began eroding soon after the successful New York run of Oh Dad ended. Images of senseless and violent death — whether in Dallas (the assassination of President Kennedy) or Saigon (the first stirrings of the Vietnam War) — courtesy of the evening television news, began putting the country much closer to the heart and soul of the absurd.

For Kopit, however, it was a bit too late. The absurd had in fact become passe and had jumped from the fringe into the mainstream. Kopit, with a seemingly bottomless bag of new tricks, absorbed what he had learned through parodic imitation and simply moved on, becoming over his long career one of the most diverse and innovative playwrights in the American theater.

Source: John W. Fiero, for Drama for Students, Gale, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers (1942) offers a jaundiced view of the American values, institutions, and traditions, including what he calls “momism,” the hypocritical American mother, and sexual mores.
• Terance McNally’s And Things That Go Bump in the Night (1964) is a play that, like Oh Dad, has absurd, nightmarish elements and deals with a dysfunctional family.
• Edward Albee’s plays The American Dream (1961) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) are contemporaries of Oh Dad and invite comparison with Kopit’s play in respect to both theme and technique.
• Arthur Adamov’s absurdist plays Les Retrouvailles (“The Recovered,” 1952) and Comme Nous Avons Ete (“As We Were,” 1953), like Kopit’s Oh Dad, examine the theme of destructive parental control.