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

Further Reading

• Auerbach, Doris. Sam Shepard, Arthur Kopit, and the Off-Broadway Theater, Twayne, 1982.

  Besides offering useful critical analyses of Kopit’s early work, especially Oh Dad, Indians, The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis, and Wings, this study has an important chapter surveying the history of the Off-Broadway Theatre.

• Bordman, Gerald. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1930-1969, Oxford University Press, 1996.

  This work documents the production history of American theater over four decades and provides a good survey of the dramatic milieu in which Kopit and other early American absurdists wrote. For Bordman, the American theater went into a decline in the 1960s, after having passed through “Golden” and “Silver” periods.

• Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd, 3rd edition, Peregrine, 1987.

  Important chapters on the absurdity, tradition, and significance of the absurd remain mandatory for an understanding of the aims and methods of those writers lumped under the absurd rubric by Esslin. In “Parallels and Proselytes,” Esslin gives Kopit early notice as an American example, along with Edward Albee and Jack Gelber.

• Kopit, Arthur. “The Vital Matter of Environment” in Theatre Arts, Vol. XLV, April, 1961, pp. 12-13.

  In this brief article, Kopit offers important insights into the state of the American commercial theater — its “inability to assimilate traditions” and its lack of invention. Although not an artistic manifesto, the article reveals the playwright’s mind set at the time Oh Dad was being readied for its London production.

• Little, Stuart W. Off Broadway: The Prophetic Theater, Coward, McCann, & Geoghegan, 1972.

  Little’s study is a documentary history and useful guide to the Off-Broadway movement from 1952-1972, the period during which Kopit rose to prominence.

• Wellworth, George. The Theater of Protest and Paradox, New York University Press, 1964.

  This study discusses the new, alternative theater of the 1950s and early- 1960s and is valuable for its coverage of the early critical responses to Oh Dad.