Y2K (Criticism)

Criticism

April Schulthies

Schulthies is an editor who holds a master’s degree in English literature and teaches English at the community college level. In the following essay, she examines surrealistic evil and its harmful effects in Kopit’s play.

Arthur Kopit’s contemporary drama Y2K creates a feeling of lurking evil in a surrealistic setting. Kopit suggests an ominous unreality that hints at, rather than shouts of, potential danger. The evil feels close at hand because it “lives” in personal computers, which people keep in their private homes. As people use their computers, they reveal personal information in e-mails and in their Internet use. In Y2K, Kopit poses the question, what if the most personal details of people’s lives could be tapped into and used against them?

Computers “talk” to one another at high speeds, networks record messages sent and received, and information of all kinds is submitted and accepted. But, as Kopit points out, information is also being tracked. Personal profiles are collected and saved. “Cookies” store strings of text on a user’s computer in order to monitor the user’s activities. Servers record the Internet Protocol address of the user and sometimes link it to personal information. As his drama progresses, Kopit shows that as people are served by the computer, the computer is serving others who may be evil.

Kopit’s Y2K shows the disastrous effects of privacy invasion in the technological age. When Joseph Elliot uses his computer, he is unaware of the lurking presence of someone bent on revenge. But other eyes can monitor his progress through a Web site and keep track of his preferences and personal data. Later Joseph is shocked to find out that using his computer opened the door to prying eyes, because, as he relates to his wife, he thought the computer was his “FRIEND.”

Joseph and his wife learn that there are eyes eagerly compiling all the personal data they can. As their daily lives crumble like so many bits of scrambled data, the Elliots enter a surrealistic world, haunted by the fact that their personal identities are not their own.

Among the billions of people on the earth, many use computers on a daily basis. The scope for privacy invasion is vast and frightening. In Y2K, Kopit skims the surface of such a possibility, using a villain who respects no one and who recognizes no limits. Inspired by the way Kenneth Starr pursued Monica Lewinsky after her affair with President Clinton, Kopit displays a personal vendetta that destroys the lives of others.

In his preface to the drama, Kopit writes that he was impressed by what he called Starr’s “fascism.” Webster’s dictionary defines fascism as “a strongly nationalistic regime characterized by regimentation, rigid censorship, and suppression of opposition.” Kopit sees these qualities in the political environment that allowed Kenneth Starr to examine the most intimate details of Lewinsky’s life.

Y2K starts off in an abandoned warehouse, where Joseph is being questioned by two Secret Service men. It is an unbelievable setting and an unbelievable circumstance; Joseph is being interrogated, but interrogated with unlikely, nonsensical questions that he does not appear to understand. This is followed by a scene in which Joseph learns that his daughter has called his apartment and said that she received an obscene phone call from someone who sounded like him.

Unreality follows unreality in such a tangle that it is hard to make sense of the facts. Most of the play takes place in the living room of Joseph and Joanne, who are both in their second marriage. In what is supposedly a private domain, the two are watched by the play’s villain, the young and vindictive Costa Astrakhan.

Suffering from an apparent God complex, Astrakhan is an outrageous figure with neon hair and neon shoes. He has a taste for power that he is only able to satisfy through the computer. “And though you cannot see where I really am, I can see all of you,” Astrakhan gloats.

Astrakhan is infuriated over being accused of cheating, though he admits to the audience he has cheated. Expelled from Joseph Elliot’s class for plagiarism, Astrakhan decides that no one can hide from him. Through technology, he has the power to slake his desire for revenge.

As Kopit notes in his preface, the pursuit of Monica Lewinsky by Kenneth Starr was something Kopit found alarming. With his penchant for prying, Astrakhan seems to represent Kenneth Starr. If so, then Astrakhan’s evil madness would reflect a kind of diabolical insanity that Kopit saw in Starr. Just as Starr based his investigation on actual events that were nonetheless denied, so too does Astrakhan base his attack on recorded facts.

Astrakhan is a demented figure of malice. His grasp of reality is so minimal that it is impossible to tell whether there is any real reason for his act of revenge or whether he invented it. Certainly he seems to have no conscience. Kopit seems to indicate that therein lies the danger: if someone has the ability to spy on others, he probably will, whether there is justification for it or not. Evil will take command.

The setting for the play feels unreal partly because what happens and what doesn’t happen is unclear. The audience sees things that one character remembers but another does not. One moment the Elliots seem like a devoted couple, and the next they are insulting each other. At times there is warmth and understanding between them, and at others there is animosity. It is difficult to determine whether they are to be pitied; they almost seem to become part of the evil that is haunting them.

Kopit shows that reality is a fragile thing. Joanne admits to Joseph that she got into a limousine with her ex-husband, Francis Summerhays, because it was raining. Her husband finds his wife’s behavior extraordinary and questions her on it. After all, she had just been comparing Francis to a vampire. Does Joanne really despise her ex-husband? Or is she fascinated by him? As for Joseph, he seems overly adamant about how little he uses a computer. Does he really only turn on his computer only every once in awhile, or does he use it for something that might be embarrassing? What is true?

Unreal circumstances plague Y2K. Bits of reality mix with complete fiction in such a way that the real story is unclear. Both Joanne and Joseph are unsure of events, but so, too, is the audience. Did Joanne have an affair with Joseph’s male student? She certainly seems to think it more likely that Joseph would have an affair with one of his female students. Do either of the Elliots know with certainty that the other is a moral, decent person? After all, they supposedly had an affair together while Joseph’s first wife was dying of cancer.

Kopit seems to be saying that perhaps no one’s life should be scrutinized too closely. Joseph and Joanne feel the impact on their personal relationships as they focus on how little they trust each other rather than on how they can start reclaiming their lives. Misery fills them, as neither knows how many of the lies Astrakhan invents have a basis in truth.

Joanne tells her husband that they can explain that all of the information is false — information on the computer that indicates that she is practically a prostitute and that he is a sex offender. But her husband replies, “But all of it is not fake.... Is it?”

All this doubt is substantiated by the slipperiness of Y2K’s characters. There is no real reason to believe that Joanne and Joseph would not do any of the lewd things that are hinted at. After all, both of them use language that indicates a lack of sensitivity to each other, so it is not difficult to believe that they are inured to what is decent and what is not. On the other hand, there is quite a bit of evidence that the two genuinely care about each other, as when Joanne goes to comfort her husband when he is remembering his first wife’s pregnancy during her chemotherapy. It seems unlikely that either would behave in a way calculated to hurt the other.

But the suspicion is there; evil has entered. When the incriminating photos make an appearance, Joanne at first denies they are real and then recalls that at least one of them may be. When she is asked if she really did make advances to Astrakhan, Joanne denies it, saying, “It’s the sort of thing I generally remember. Joseph, have you lost your mind?”

Astrakhan is the supreme figure of evil in the play. He goes by a number of aliases, including “ISeeU.” While he is watching others, Astrakhan clearly is not very much aware of himself. He invents a whole history in which he is the son of Joseph’s first wife, Annabel. He plagiarizes a pornographic story and then claims it is an autobiography. He “remembers” having an affair with Joanne, who says she scarcely recalls meeting him. The question of how much of what he remembers is invention and how much is based on truth is never answered.

Strange as the circumstances are, the characters are stranger yet. They seem intent on sexual encounters, whether imagined or real, in a manner that seems to mirror the Starr investigation. The lines between what actually occurred and what didn’t are blurred. Joanne either went to see her mother or made up the trip as a cover for an illicit encounter; Joseph either used his computer as a paperweight or used it for something far less serviceable; Astrakhan either invented his encounters with, and dismissal by, Joanne or was simply recalling something Joanne preferred to forget.

If there was any clarity to the Elliots’ lives to begin with, there certainly is none by the end of the play. The two become a mere invention, victims of the kind of abuse perpetrated by computer hackers. “We are nothing but abstractions now — strings of digits, signifying anything you want, floating in the ether,” Joseph tells his wife.

Purposely playing on the fear of having identities recreated by someone with malignant intent, Kopit blends the known and the unknown so that the truth is impossible to detect. Unreality pervades, and evil is a felt but ill-defined presence. Reputation, finances, and trust vanish before the victims understand what is happening. The computer — the trusted and seemingly benign servant — has become a corrupt master.

Source: April Schulthies, Critical Essay on Y2K, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Ryan D. Poquette

Poquette has a bachelor of arts degree in English and specializes in writing drama and film. In the following essay, Poquette explores Kopit’s manipulation of truth and reality.

Today, as never before, ordinary people can acquire the power to reshape the reality of a person’s life — by becoming computer hackers. In Kopit’s Y2K, the playwright elevates hacking to an art form, in the process challenging the audience’s definition of truth in the digital age.

The nineteen-year-old computer hacker in Y2K, Costa Astrakhan, who is also the play’s narrator, addresses the audience early in the play: “With what I know, I can go anywhere, and you can too.”

For the duration of the play, Astrakhan demonstrates to the audience exactly how to alter a person’s life in cyberspace, using Joseph and Joanne Elliot as his real-life tutorial. By the end of the play, Astrakhan has revised the Elliots’ respective lives so that Joseph, a Random House book editor and teacher, is a child pornographer, while Joanne, who works at Sotheby’s, the famous art auction house, is “a kind of porno star.” Says Joseph to his wife: “And now it seems he has revised my life. No, rewritten it. I’ve got a whole new history, Joanne.”

It is an ironic twist of events for Joseph, a man who has made much of his fortune editing others’ stories. He says as much to his wife:

If I could just step back, I would admire it. Because what he’s done of course is written a kind of novel. Only not in the old fashioned linear one-sentence-follows-the-other sort of way, but, somehow, in all dimensions, simultaneously. A novel built of zeroes and ones. And we are its characters.

Through his computer hacking, Kopit arms Astrakhan with a new-age model for storytelling, a real-life story on a grand scale that surpasses the impact of any other medium. Books, plays, films — all of these artistic creations require the reader or viewer to transport themselves inside the world of the story. But in Astrakhan’s digital story, the audience is the entire world, and the characters are real-life people who face real-life consequences — not figments of an author’s imagination.

“We are nothing but abstractions now — strings of digits, signifying anything you want, floating in the ether,” Joseph says to Joanne.

In this era of modern drama, where the boundaries of realism have been tested for more than a hundred years, Kopit breaks through into new territory, creating an art form for the new millennium — the scripting of reality itself. In the beginning, however, the audience watching Kopit’s play doesn’t suspect that this is what Astrakhan is doing, in part due to his style of keep-no-secrets narration. As Katie Hafner of the New York Times notes to Kopit in an e-mail interview, “[Astrakhan is] a classic unreliable narrator.”

Throughout the play, Astrakhan seems to be upfront and honest, telling people both bad and good things about himself, when in fact he is a liar. As Kopit says in his e-mail interview, “Generally, we assume that when someone says something in a seemingly honest way, it’s true — or at least what that person thinks is true.” Astrakhan’s forthright and direct manner is put in an even better light when contrasted with the Elliots, who aren’t always truthful with each other. This helps to sway the audience into believing that Astrakhan’s narration of current and past events — which the audience is seeing brought to life on stage — is in fact correct. For a large portion of the play, the audience assumes that Joanne has had an affair with Astrakhan, who describes the sordid details of their affair in vivid and specific detail. Says Astrakhan, “Am I being indiscrete? I’m sorry but there’s no avoiding it. Not if honesty is to be our policy. And truth to be told.”

It is a complete shock to the audience to find out that Joanne doesn’t even recall meeting Astrakhan. Up until this point, the audience thinks they are getting more accurate information than the Elliots since Astrakhan confides in the audience constantly. This final, long scene, in which Joseph describes the particulars of how Astrakhan has ruined their lives, is the turning point in the play, where both the Elliots and the audience realize that they’ve been had. “Strategically, Kopit wants to challenge the solidity of both the Elliots’ and the audience’s sense of reality,” said John Lahr in his review in the New Yorker.

Astrakhan’s tendency to have false memories is particularly interesting since he is so adamant about telling the truth. The play is saturated with references to honesty and truth, and many of them are from Astrakhan, emphasizing to the audience that he is an honest person. Astrakhan addresses the audience: “I only tell the truth. That’s because lying is obscene.” And yet Astrakhan lies to himself and the audience, even when he is reenacting fake events from his past, such as when Joanne asks how old he is in a false memory. “Sixteen,” he replies, having just told Joseph a few minutes ago that he is fifteen. When describing another event from his false past with the Elliots, Astrakhan hints at the narrative process that he uses to rewrite both his own history and that of the Elliots: “not a day passes that I don’t bring it back to mind, with, somehow, each time, some new detail emerging, until now it seems even clearer than it was back then. Funny, how memory works.”

The idea of real versus fictionalized memories is familiar territory for Kopit. Says Lahr, “Y2K... is another of Kopit’s brilliant speculations informed by fact, an unnerving hall of mirrors that adds a new perspective to his obsession with memory and identity.” Astrakhan takes his cue from a Flaubert quote that Joseph likes to quote to his writing class: “Everything you invent is true.” This is certainly the case with Astrakhan’s new brand of digital fiction, although it needs a kernel of truth upon which to support the digital narrative. In the case of the Elliots, this seed of truth is never disclosed to the audience. Although Joseph reveals one secret to Joanne, the fact that he and his ex-wife aborted their child during its last trimester when she was undergoing chemotherapy, this is not the other secret to which both he and Astrakhan refer. One suspects that the secret is most likely some dabbling in pornography since this is the major crime that Astrakhan pins on Joseph in the hacker’s digital story. Says Joseph to Joanne: “Speaking for myself, there are things he has found — about me — and which he’s tucked in with all of the really dreadful ’invented’ stuff — which is going to come out.” Joseph suggests that Joanne has dark secrets as well, especially after seeing lurid photos of her with other men, some of which don’t look fake. Whether Joanne is telling the truth to Joseph doesn’t matter. In the digital age, the hacker’s reality is the only one that anybody else will believe. “Astrakhan has the power to re-create the virtual universe at will in his own demented image,” says Lahr.

So what is Astrakhan’s image? What is the idea that he develops so carefully when he revises the Elliots’ lives and his own memories? He wishes to be a part of the Elliots’ family. And by manipulating their lives and scripting new histories for them, Astrakhan writes himself into their lives for good. Astrakhan tells the audience that Joseph was “his way in,” then corrects himself: “No, let’s be honest: to me he is far more than that. In fact, always has been. I just hadn’t discovered it yet.” Astrakhan’s “discovery,” is the aborted baby, and through the hacker’s manipulation of hospital records, he brings the baby back to life and becomes that baby. Astrakhan foreshadows this turn of events at several points throughout the play, especially when he refers to Joseph as a kind of father figure. “If only someone like you had entered my life earlier, my life would be entirely different now,” Astrakhan tells Joseph in a false memory.

In another false memory of his first visit to the Elliots’ apartment, Astrakhan tells Joseph: “When I

publish my first novel, I tell you this is where I’m gonna live.” Astrakhan goes on to clarify that he didn’t mean live with “you and your wife... nice as that might be!” Astrakhan does in fact publish his novel, at least in the digital sense, by creating the new life stories of the Elliots. And in the end, he does end up living with the Elliots, or at least the audience suspects that he will, based on the last few lines of the play:

Like any homecoming, it will be difficult at first. For all of us. So much to get used to! But we will. In time. And then... Yes... It will all be, once again, as I remember it.... And I will take care of them, forever and ever.

“The villain of Mr. Kopit’s slender play is, in fact, quite a twisted piece of humanity,” says Peter Marks in his New York Times review, and by the end of the play, the audience agrees. Joseph could try to fight the hacker by proving his innocence, but the tools at the hacker’s disposal are too massive. Astrakhan has created such a large, intricate, digital history that it is almost impossible to disprove. Furthermore, to mount such a massive campaign would require funds that Joseph and Joanne no longer have because Astrakhan has made their bank accounts unattainable, as he himself is unattainable. As Joseph explains to Joanne: “Thompson says it’s almost impossible to know where he actually is, his messages are all time-delayed and routed in a Byzantine way Thompson claims is like a work of art.” For the Elliots, the unfortunate, unwilling characters in a hacker’s digital story, reality is whatever their new puppetmaster says it is.

Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on Y2K, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Chris Semansky

Semansky is an instructor of English literature and composition and writes regularly for literary

magazines and journals. In this essay, he considers the idea of representation in Kopit’s play.

On the surface, Kopit’s play, Y2K, is a cautionary tale about computer technology taking over peoples’ lives. In positioning technology as the enemy, Kopit raises questions about the representative power of words and images, suggesting that they hold the key to human identity.

In his preface, Kopit writes that he was inspired to write the play after being outraged by Special Investigator Kenneth Starr’s intrusion into the private life of Monica Lewinsky during his investigation of her relationship with former president Bill Clinton. Like the Clinton-Lewinsky story, Kopit’s play releases information incrementally, by different players at key points, essentially reshaping what the audience (the audience for the Clinton-Lewinsky story being the media-consuming public) believes to be the truth. Both stories change the audience perception of the central characters by throwing private actions into public light. Y2K, however, suggests that what happens to Joseph Elliot and his wife, Joanne, can happen to anyone.

In foregrounding the power of technology to reconstitute human identity, Kopit begs certain questions about what makes people who they are. Assumptions about human identity that have guided thinking in the industrialized world include the notion that identity is universal and is based on features such as character and personality, which are intrinsic to a person. In contrast, Kopit’s play emphasizes the notion that identity rests primarily upon the idea of narrative, rather than anything intrinsic or essential. That is, the story of a person’s life, in fact, is that person’s life. Kopit underscores this idea by manipulating readers’ expectations of the truth, so that characters such as Joseph and Joanne, who once seemed to be certain types of people, turn out (possibly) to be other types entirely. By putting stories inside stories inside stories, Kopit blurs the distinction between reality and fiction, creating a hall of mirrors in which characters can no longer recognize characters and readers must construct their own theories for what happened and why. There is no single demonstrable truth against standing behind the many versions of events.

The play opens with punk hacker Costa Astrakhan bragging about his power and his ubiquity. Telling the audience he is everywhere, “on the outskirts of your mind, in the ether, in the darkness,” Astrakhan portrays himself as an arrogant and unreliable narrator. Astrakhan appears both as a realistic character in the play, interacting with Joanne and Joseph during a dinner at their apartment, and as a demonic presence, hovering over and commenting on the play’s action. In the latter role, he is symbolic of technology’s pervasive influence in peoples’ lives. Astrakhan’s speeches about his power, his hacking history, and his relationship with Joanne provide the explanation for much of what happens to Joanne and Joseph. In this way, the play is didactic, meaning that its purpose is to teach the audience something. What it teaches, however, is not so clear. Ostensibly, the play is about the evils of computer technology; but it is also about trust, marital and generational, and the relationship between private and public realities.

Without Astrakhan’s speeches, the play would be more of a mystery. By using Astrakhan as a symbolic character, Kopit introduces nonrealistic elements in the play. Nonrealistic plays differ from realistic plays in that they often distort character and time and use symbolic as opposed to realistic settings. Samuel Beckett’s plays, for example, are nonrealistic plays, as they usually ignore both clock time and historical time and have absurd settings, such as cartoon-like characters inhabiting trashcans. Other nonrealistic playwrights include Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, and David J. LeMaster. By combining realistic elements such as believable settings and action with nonrealistic elements, Kopit further reinforces the idea that reality itself is an unstable phenomenon over which people often have little control.

Take the character of Joanne, for example. Kopit masterfully pits readers’ knowledge of her, which they gain through seeing her interact with her husband, against Astrakhan’s story of her life, which he puts together by hacking into computer systems, including her own and her husband’s. At first, she appears to be a loving, if somewhat distracted, wife to Joseph, effervescent and with a dry sense of humor. The audience finds out through the couple’s interaction that Joanne is fending off the advances of her ex-husband, Francis Summerhays, a wealthy and obsessive venture capitalist, whom Joseph despises. Astrakhan’s representation of her mixes what appears to be fact — details of her birth, education, etc. — with a story of how they came to be lovers. However, even though readers have every reason to doubt Astrakhan’s version of Joanne’s life and especially of their “affair” — after all, he is a proven liar, plagiarist, drug abuser, and self-confessed hacker — they have no credible alternative to what really happened. Joanne’s credibility has already been compromised. Joseph distrusts her, partly because of his own jealousy of Francis and partly because she was reluctant to provide complete information about her encounter with Francis. In addition, throughout most of the play, the characters drink heavily, causing the audience to question the truthfulness and motivation of their words.

As the audience re-evaluates the truthfulness of the various characters’ versions of events in light of new information, they also begin to question the characters’ motivation. This resembles the way in which the Clinton-Lewinsky affair unfolded and, indeed, the way in which many such situations unfold, where a secret is gradually brought to light by others not initially involved. In some ways, the play resembles a courtroom drama with evidence offered, stories presented and denied, intent and motivation probed, and a jury voting to believe one side’s version of events versus another side’s.

One of the primary theories that viewers and readers of Y2K must consider is the possibility that the entire play is a construct of Astrakhan’s mind. His words frame the action, and his god-like presence

during the course of events suggests that he controls what gets said and done. Although Astrakhan has claimed that he initially became interested in Joseph because he wanted to sleep with a girl in Joseph’s writing class, readers are later told that his “true” motivation is to reunite with the Elliots, whom he believes are his biological parents. But even this motivation for ruining their lives is questionable, given Astrakhan’s previous explanations.

If readers consider the play as the machinations of Astrakhan’s mind, complete with the invention of characters, self-referentiality, and stories inside stories, they must ask themselves what larger symbolic meaning this hacker fantasy holds. One explanation is that Astrakhan’s story represents the vengeance of a younger generation upon an older one. As someone barely out of his teens (or so he says at the beginning of the play), Astrakhan stands in for what marketing demographers sometime refer to as Generation Y, those born between 1979 and 1994. The children of baby boomers, they are also sometimes referred to as Echo Boomers, or the Millennium Generation. Even more so than Generation X, which preceded them, Generation Y has something to prove. Often raised by parents who espouse the idealistic values of the 1960s, but with all the material privilege that the bull market of the 1980s and 1990s have given them, Generation Y’ers are the literal embodiment of deeply rooted contradictions.

Carving out their own identities, then, means grappling with the identity of their parents. Astrakhan, then, as hacker and playwright, “solves” this problem by first creating his parents, the Elliots, then destroying them, and then, in the play’s final image, holding himself out as their possible salvation. As a Generation Y son of boomers, he creates the family he never had, and on his own terms. The fact that it is a virtual family is apropos for a generation raised on the (for Kopit, ironic) promise of computer technology to improve the quality of human life.

Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on Y2K, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

“IN Y2K, KOPIT POSES THE QUESTION, WHAT IF THE MOST PERSONAL DETAILS OF PEOPLE’S LIVES COULD BE TAPPED INTO AND USED AGAINST THEM?”