Word: kopit
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...Arthur Kopit is too impatient to take anything seriously. If you saw him navigate his little black Porsche through Mass. Ave. traffic, you'd conclude, there goes a man completely out of his head. In God knows how many gears, he cut off buses, trucks, and pedestrians, ignoring the laws of Cambridge, physics, and common sense. "I got by 'em before they knew where I was," he claimed. His driving was almost a happening. Had it been less absurd he'd have been mashed, but as it was it was outrageously funny...
...came to see a happening," Kopit told the senior tutor of Dunster House, though officially he had been invited for a week by the House, whose dining hall had been the proving ground for his first plays. Now he was again roaming through the House and holding forth in the common room, playing the house grad made good on the outside and loving every minute of it. He looked quite the serious playwright, too, smoking slim cigarillos, and sporting a well-trimmed beard and a natty continental suit. But his mood contained more nostalgia than triumph...
During his years at Dunster, before his graduation in 1959, Kopit wrote two Christmas plays and several one-actors. "My Christmas productions, Don Juan in Texas and Across the River and Into the Jungle, had everything in them, even huge barroom brawls. We threw them together in two days, but the audiences loved them anyway. Everyone was always drunk." One of his other plays, The Questioning of Nick, about a high school basketball player accused of throwing a game, was later put on television...
...Kopit's greater success, the one that carried him into the legitimate theatre, was produced not by Dunster but by the Adams House Drama Society. Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad premiered at Agassiz Theatre in January, 1960. Within a month it was snatched up by New York agents and moved to an off-Broadway house, whence it was again snatched up, this time by Hollywood...
...last play concerned three African officials who visit the United States and eventually eat their gorgeous Peace Corps girl guide. "It did not work," Kopit said, because although the Africans were not supposed to be the villains, many people interpreted them as such...