Other Verdicts

Oh Dad did not have clear sailing all the way, however. It suffered a lethal production in London last summer, and was withdrawn after a fortnight. The "anonymous" Anthony Cookman of the London Times wrote of "what appears to be intended as a hilarious skit on the lonesco School of Playwrights," but found the direction and acting ruinously "heavy-handed."

Kenneth Tynan, the second most influential of British critics (after Harold Hobson), said in the Observer of the production that "instead of floating along with the right impertinent buoyancy it slumped like a leaden souffle.... Of high comic style, in which the play abounds, the production was devoid. Mr. Kopit deserves better than this."

Variety's London correspondent found it "'sick,' not very pleasant entertainment, though there may be hidden [!] symbolism that justifies some of the more uneasy events." Charles Marowitz' dispatch to the Village Voice called it "the excrescence of the New Drama which has been vacuumed of half a dozen plays and emptied into a new container," and added that "the [leading] actress and the playwright both get splattered when the wit hits the fan."

The current New York production has, like most things of lasting value, elicited mixed reviews initially. Howard Taubman of the Times found the play "funny, weird, stageworthy and nonsensical.... If you don't insist on a full measure of sense, Mr. Kopit has a fanciful, droll, lurid way with the theatre." In his follow-up Sunday piece Taubman voiced some reservations about the script, such as that it "has its share of irrelevancies that fall into no pattern of communication," but he concluded that Kopit "may become an important playwright."

Walter Keer, of the Herald Tribune, found it "an anti-feminist demonstration scored for in bugles, toy drums, and kazoos." He thought Kopit "slavishly indebted to his predecessors in the Theatre of the Absurd," but said he "is easily articulate, sometimes graceful even, and the mists that drift by have a way of taking what may be their most natural and frightening bodily shape." Kerr was ecstatic about the performers.

Richard Watts, in the Post, said Kopit "appears more preoccupied with achieving oddity of approach than with what he is saying by suggestion," and thought the play "has a self-consciousness in its studied madness that can be unfortunately tiresome." James Davis (Daily News) shrugged the show off as "a total bust. Playwright Kopit seems to have a funny sense of humor--funny peculiar." And John McClain (Journal-American) called it "every bit as perverse and nonsensical as the title."

"Baffling and perverse and irreverent as it is," wrote Stanley Koven in the National Observer, "Oh Dad sweeps its audience up and gallops off on a kind of Marx Brothers excursion into the avant-grade." Calling it "a perverse comic nightmare" in the New Yorker, Edith Oliver stated. "Seldom can a production have more effectively carried out the ideas of a playwright than this one."

Henry Hewen (Saturday Review) hailed Kopit as a "new playwright of extraordinary skill, perception, and brilliance." He wrote that "what is original with him is the area he so brilliantly, entertainingly, and cruelly explores," and called the play's current production "the most exciting theatre the Phoenix has produced in several seasons."