Arthur Kopit is the author of: Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad; Indians (Tony Nominee, Finalist for Pulitzer Prize); Wings (Tony Nominee, Finalist for Pulitzer Prize); a new translation of Ibsen's Ghosts; the book for the musical Nine (score by Maury Yeston; Tony Award for Best Musical, 1982; Tony Award for Best Musical revival, 2003)*; End of the World, with Symposium to Follow; the book for the musical Phantom (score by Maury Yeston); the book for the musical High Society (score by Cole Porter, additional lyrics by Susan Birkenhead); Road to Nirvana; Because HeCan (originally entitled Y2K); Chad Curtiss, Lost Again, and numerous one act plays.

CURRENT PROJECTS include Discovery of America, a play based on the journals of the Spanish conquistador, Cabeza deVaca, and four other new plays, Secrets of the Rich, Autumn Light, The Incurables, and A Dram of Drumchhicit, the latter written with Anton Dudley, and scheduled to be produced next season at La Jolla Playhouse.

AS A TEACHER: Mr. Kopit has taught playwriting at the Rita and Burton Goldberg Graduate Department of Dramatic Writing at NYU; the Yale Drama School, Yale College, Columbia University, Harvard and Princeton. Mr. Kopit is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Dramatists Guild Council, and The Lark Play Development Center, where he heads The Lark Playwrights’ Workshop. He lives in New York with his wife, the writer Leslie Garis. They have three children.

* Nine is to be released as a motion picture, directed by Rob Marshall, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz, Judy Dench, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, Marion Cotillard, and Fergie, in December, 2009)

Check out Arthur’s plays,
available from Samuel French

Chamber Music
The Conquest of Everest
The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis
End of the World with Symposium to Follow (Revised)
Ghosts (Kopit, trans.)
Good Help Is Hard To Find
Hero, The
Indians
Nine
Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet
and I'm Feelin’ So Sad
Phantom
The Questioning of Nick
Road to Nirvana
Sing to Me Through Open Windows
Wings

Q & A with Arthur Kopit

Q: You have had a long and impressive career as a playwright. How has your work changed over the years? While all of your plays are quite distinct, do you feel there has been a shift in how you write, or perhaps in the subject matter that is of interest to you?

A. I would assume it has changed, because I’ve certainly changed. But how has it changed? I’m really not sure. I’m certainly more in control of my craft. But that’s not always good. Sometimes, just plunging in, not knowing what you’re doing, or even where you’re going, leads to discoveries you might not have made otherwise. But I’m pretty good at putting myself in a state of mind, when I write, in which it’s as if I know nothing. And I’m pretty good at not worrying about “merit.” Worrying about merit is a killer. Whether the work has merit is not my task. At least, not initially.

I’ve also gotten better at sensing when I’m treading water, so to speak; circling around until the work (I hope) shows me its center, and a proper direction.

But I don’t think there’s been any significant thematic change in my work. Or at least none I can notice. Probably because I never read what others write about me, reviews included, I never think about the themes that apparently attract me. So, to a great extent, each play I work on is like a first play, and what I want is for it to take me over, and show me things I didn’t suspect when I began.

Teaching has helped this process. I don’t know how much I’ve taught others, or helped others, but I’ve been very fortunate to have very good students, and the process of teaching them has certainly taught me things, at least. But that’s another topic, and if I go into it now I’ll get to nothing else.

Q: Your musical, NINE, will soon be a major motion picture. How did your experience of collaborating on the original musical differ from working on one of your plays? Was there much revision from the 1982 original to the 2003 revival? How involved were you in the process of adapting your work for the screen?

A. In reverse order: (3) I was not involved in adapting Nine for the screen, and rightly so. My vision was so rooted to the stage I could never have found the necessary distance to re-see the story in the kind of way such adaptations require, which is a bit odd, because when I wrote the original book, I was working from Fellini’s film (plus, of course, Maury’s music).

(2) Except for the song, “Germans at the Spa,” which was cut from the revival, there were no major revisions, or at least none I can recall, and since “Germans...” was a clean cut, I did not need to do anything to help that along. There was a bit of dialogue-tweaking in some of the transitions, or in odd moments here and there, due to the differences in the staging, but nothing much. Basically, the original show worked in this new configuration.

(1) Working on a musical, or at least working on one in which you are not writing the book, music and lyrics, is very different from working on a play. The most obvious, and possibly important, difference is that this is not your piece. It is a collective piece, and what you do, as book writer, has to mesh with what the lyricist and composer are doing, the hope being that it all becomes one. It does no good to insist on your book being kept the way you wrote it if no one else likes it that way (which you can if it’s your play). In many ways, the book writer is there to make sure everything else works. Indeed, possibly the most important task in doing a musical is to make sure that everyone, director included, is doing the same show. This is not an easy task. Self-delusion being what it is, everyone probably thinks they are doing the same show. They certainly set out to. (Or better have.) But they may not be. Or not any longer. That focus can slip away when you’re not looking. And the difference between what everyone is actually doing collectively, and what they all set out to do, and believe they still are doing, may only be a subtle difference, but it could be enough to doom the project. So making sure everything is on track is one of the book writer’s principal tasks, since the book writer is in charge of the story, and the structure. Well, sort of. In theory, that task should be everyone’s, and indeed it is, in principle. But in practice? That’s another story. So the book writer has to be strong enough, and often wily enough, to bring it to his collaborators’ attention when he thinks their ship has suddenly veered off course.

Being flexible is another attribute a book-writer needs to possess in ways playwrights don’t. Because if you, as book writer, write a scene that everyone loves, including your director, but your director tells you it would take too long to stage as written (given the time all those dance numbers are going to take), you’d probably best write it another way, maybe so it becomes a dance number itself.

All in all, it’s a different mindset. But when it’s going well, it’s great fun. Indeed, far more fun than watching one of your plays being staged. That’s because playwrights, if they are anything like me, are way too nervous during the rehearsal process to ever really enjoy it. But with a musical, if it is going well—and that’s a big if—but if it is, sometimes you just can sit back and watch what your collaborators are doing. And actually, yes, enjoy it.

And at the end of it all, if it’s been going well, something will have emerged that neither you nor your collaborators ever fully expected, but is better than you’d expected, and not any one of you did it; you all did it. And for me, that was Nine. And I know Maury, and Tommy Tune, felt the same.

Q: You have served as a teacher and mentor to many playwrights over the years. How do you suggest a young writer approach a career in playwriting?

A. With caution, hope, passion, and somewhere some humility (because luck is going to have a lot to do with it), and even a bit of hubris, because you are playing God. Also, you’d probably better have some kind of backup plan in mind, because, as the playwright Robert Anderson once wisely said, “playwrights can make a killing, but they can’t make a living.” Your only security is your talent. Which means, in a way, you’re prepared for times like the ones we’re in right now. Primarily, and finally, you simply have to believe in yourself.

Q: When and/or how did you know that you wanted to create plays?

A. I was about to say, when I wrote my first play, which was a one-act, in my sophomore year in college. But in fact, though I had indeed loved writing it, especially the anonymity of being no one in the play, and yet being everyone, the turning point came when I saw it produced the next year, and I thought, oh my God, might it be possible for me to spend my life doing this? It was the audience that did it. Seeing and feeling their reactions. Plus, hearing my lines come alive. I was hooked.

Q: How did you come up with the title of your play, OH, DAD, POOR DAD, MAMMA’S HUNG YOU IN THE CLOSET AND I’M FEELIN’ SO SAD?

A. It was, believe it or not, the first title that occurred to me. I had no title while I was working on it. Didn’t even think about a title. And then I finished it, and indeed, the very moment I wrote the last line I thought, now what the hell do I call this thing? And that title popped into my mind, full-blown. I thought, I can’t call it that! That’s ridiculous! But I liked it. Somehow, it seemed like the right title. And I thanked my muses. And that was it. I had not set out to write a long title. That wasn’t on my mind. And no, I was not smoking anything.

Q: What inspires you to take on a new project?

A. Something that draws me for reasons I don’t fully understand. It’s deeply personal, but, again, in ways I don’t understand. I like it that way. Because if I know everything about my play before I begin, and about its characters, why write it? People always say, write about what you know. I think what’s more important is to write about something you didn’t know you knew.

Q: Have you ever come across a production that made you see one of your plays in a new or unexpected way?

A. I did see numerous productions of my play “Wings,” about a woman who’s had a stroke, which had been done so brilliantly on Broadway that I thought I could never see it done another way. But then I did, and it worked in lots of different ways, and I saw it had a strength even I had not recognized. Which was certainly a very nice thing to see.

I know what you mean, how it’s possible for writers to see a production that completely alters their perception of their play. For example, I’ve had students, good ones, who didn’t realize, till they heard it read, that what they’d written was funny, and it threw them, because they thought being funny meant it wasn’t serious. They either get over that, or drop out. That’s not happened to me, fortunately. (I always knew, if it’s not serious it can’t be funny.) I’ve certainly seen performances that have brought out aspects of my characters that I’d never known were there. But that’s what a playwright hopes for. It’s one of the reasons we write plays.

That’s where that humility factor comes in, too. In this case, I mean the humility to recognize that writing honestly doesn’t mean you know everything about your characters. Writing honestly means being inside your characters, and allowing them to be as confused as you. The humility to realize that what you’re writing may not work. The humility to realize that you are not the final word on your play, as much as you would like to be (though you are the final word when it comes to your dialogue—on what stays in, and what goes out—after all, it is your play). But as to what it means? The best you can do sometimes is guess. But if you have written a good play, then it’s about a lot more than you thought when you began the writing, and the characters will, and should, surprise you.

Friends of mine who write only novels don’t understand how a playwright can put up with the uncertainty of productions. You give up such control! But novelists rarely see people reading their books, and on those occasions when they do, there’s no way to know how those readers are reacting. Playwrights, however, assume their productions will always be at least a bit different from what they’d imagined when they wrote. They know that going in. But at least they will experience the response. Which is when they will know if they have succeeded or not. It’s not the critics who tell them. It’s never critics. It’s the audience, being held (or not held) by what you have written, laughing (or not) where you wanted them to, or on edge where you wanted (or restless when you thought they would be on edge). For us, the audience completes the experience. The play is nothing without an audience. And the actors are the intermediary. To that extent, it’s all collaboration.