Word: kopital
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Unfortunately, Kopit has got it all backwards. He should be the one on his knees begging the audience to "stop me before I write again." After a few blissful months in which the obsessional torrent of plays stories and movies on the nuclear issue seemed to have been staunched, the American Repertory Theater's decision to resurrect this once-flopped problem play shows that the hypnotic fascination nuclear war exercises on intellectuals is as strong as ever...
...Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Just look at the details: Colonel Jack D. Ripper, the good doctor, the Soviet doomsday machine. Not only did Kubrick do nuclear armageddon first, he did it right, eschewing white-knuckled sentimental despair for ballsy black comedy--and unlike Kopit's play, Kubrick delivers on his premise with the end of the world...
...Kopit's play is almost a paradigm of the burgeoning genre of "Nuclear Lit." The brain-deadening pattern lack much variation, having been set in stone in Strangelove: introduce an outsider to what one journalist termed "the subterranean world of the bomb," then lead him or her step by step through the strategy and institutions of strategic nuclear...
...making dramatic molehills out of this political mountain (were George Bernard Shaw alive today, he might have been able to inject some new dramatic tension into the form, but in all likelihood we would have gotten another Back to Methuselah instead of a Major Barbara). What prompts people like Kopit to encroach upon the territory of nuclear arms gurus like Jonathan Schell or Joe Nye, when Kubrick beat them to the atomic punch 24 years...
...That's what. Signs of dramatic hubris are all over the place. Kopit realized whose shadow he was working under, and early in his play he dismissed Dr. Strangelove's significance to the present-day nuclear situation. He tries to add some Pirandellian interest to the issue by writing End of the World as a play about writing a play on the arms race--incidentally turning the playwright into a heroic comedian a la Neil Simon. Flailing madly for dramatic interest, Kopit scatters references to detective fiction, academia and Beltway culture that are not nearly so hip as kopit thinks...