Word: kopit
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...wasn't the first atrocity committed by Europeans against the native American. When you consider the French wars against the Indians in New York and Canada, and Lord Jeffrey Amherst's gift of smallpox-infested blankets to his Indian friends, it was not the greatest. In fact, in Arthur Kopit's Indians Buffalo Bill even shows remorse for the slaughter. "I didn't know they reproduced so slowly," he says...
...Kopit's Buffalo Bill is a Kiplingesque figure, ready to bear the white man's burden manfully to feed and clothe and look after the savages and try to civilize them. He shows genuine anger when the government leaves the Indians to starve, and even goes to Washington and tries to get the President to act. He is a civilized...
...American Indian is a natural subject for drama. The scope of the human tragedy it involves dwarfs anything produced in an average Broadway season. But the American theatrical Indian has always been of the Tonto variety, the faithful Indian sidekick, a caricature with almost no resemblance to reality. In Kopit's Indians, the white man becomes the caricature, the braggart soldier and cowardly liar, an image all too close to what he really...
...fact, if any fault is to be found with this production, it lies in the play itself. Kopit's script is uneven, scurrying unpredictably from brilliance to pathos. Some of his lines carry a sublime irony, as in the death speech of Spotted Tail, the young Indian played articulately by Fletcher Word. Bill Fuller's comic Russian Grand Duke Alexis is moved to kill a Cherokee by Bill's pompous and flatulent boasting of his slaughters of the tribe, and shoots the first Indian who comes in sight. Spotted Tail falls dead, and then rises to address the audience...
...KOPIT is not content to let his play end on a moment of high drama, when the ghost of Sitting Bull confronts Cody after the Wounded Knee Massacre. Rather, he makes a stab at the grotesque, forcing Buffalo Bill to read a catalogue of atrocities and try to justify them. His attempt fails, for this is a distortion of the character Cody has established, and the play lapses into incoherence. The dramatic affect of the play is irreparably marred by its ending...