Rosalind Russell
Madame Rosepettle
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With Rosalind Russell, Robert Morse, Barbara Harris, Hugh Griffith. A domineering mother and her sheltered son fly face first into love, murder, and the meaning of family in this black comedy based on Arthur Kopit's Broadway play.
- Richard Quine, Alexander Mackendrick
- 3 min
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- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
- Further Reading
Arthur Lee Kopit was born in New York City on May 10, 1937, son to George and Maxine Dobin Kopit. He grew up in Lawrence, on Long Island, where his father worked as a jewelry sales manager. After graduating high school in 1955, he entered Harvard University on an engineering scholarship; but he was also interested in the arts, and after his first y...
Scene I
Oh Dadopens in a luxurious hotel suite in the Caribbean Port Royale hotel. A squad of bellboys scurry in, bearing the exotic belongings of Madame Rosepettle and her son, Jonathan. Two bring in a coffin and, confused by Madame Rosepettle’s directions, pull the handles off and dump the coffin on the floor. Madame Rosepettle begins issuing orders with a wilting, supercilious sneer. She also begins an endless litany of complaints with both the hotel’s personnel and the accommodations. She directs...
Scene II
It is two weeks later. In the suite, Jonathan is talking with Rosalie, two years his senior but dressed “in a sweet girlish pink.” She asks why he can not go out. He haltingly explains that he has duties, that he must stay to feed the Venus flytraps. She presses him further, and he explains that he has at least gone out to the balcony and watched her, which encourages her to make him tell her more. She learns that he has watched her through a homemade telescope, fashioned from a blowgun and s...
Scene III
It is night, a week later. Jonathan, alone, sits in a chair near Rosalinda, the fish. Exotic carnival sounds invade the room, and Jonathan jumps up to shut the French windows but the panes come alive and sway with the music before crashing on the floor. Jonathan moves to the balcony, past the two growing Venus flytraps that begin to growl and lunge at him. Madam Rosepettle and Commodore Roseabove waltz into the room under a follow spot. They dance around the table, stopping momentarily as he...
Albert
SeeJonathan Rosepettle
Head Bellboy
The Head Bellboy, holding the rank of lieutenant, is in charge of a platoon of bellboys. He takes issue with Madame Rosepettle’s lack of respect for his position when, in the opening scene, she repeatedly insults him as he and his troop escort her, Jonathan, their luggage, and menagerie into their suite in the Port Royale hotel. After she reminds him that she is a well- heeled tourist and that she can get him another stripe, he immediately becomes her creature, contrite and meekly obedient. H...
Rosalie
Rosalie is a combination baby sitter and nanny for a dozen children left in her charge by wealthy parents who travel about and periodically send her an addition to the tribe. She is two years older than Jonathan but in terms of experience might as well be twenty years his senior. Although she is decked out in pink and white girlish innocence, she has had many sexual encounters (if her claims are to be believed). Madame Rosepettle proclaims that Rosalie has even sexually dallied in the bushes...
Absurdity
As Kopit indicated in the subtitle of Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad,he was influenced by the “bastard French tradition,” meaning the plays of the avant garde Parisian dramatists, some of whom, like Beckett and Ionesco, were expatriates living in France. Elements of the absurd include highly exaggerated, dysfunctional familial relationships, which is most notably present in the play in the maltreatment of Jonathan by his modier, whose overprotectivenes...
Obedience
Jonathan Rosepettle’s obsessive fears arise from his total obedience to his mother and her tyrannical control of him. He is a devastating caricature of the dutiful son, locked away from the outside world that his mother believes would corrupt him and turn him into another despicable man. His repressed hatred for her emasculating authority starts to well up in him, but he is so afraid of her that the most he can manage is an attack on her pets, surrogate targets that in the most primitive sens...
Death
A common feature in the Theatre of the Absurd is a farcical treatment of both death and the dead, matters that are normally treated with solemn reverence. It is their disrespectful and at times zany approach to such things that explains these plays’ paradoxical description as tragifarces. In a verytwisted sense, Oh Dadis a threnody (a dirge or lamentation of loss). Initially, Madame Rosepettle is decked out in mourning black. She and her son accompany the coffin of her departed husband in som...
Setting
Although the immediate setting of Oh Dadis an elegant suite in a luxurious resort hotel, the exotic sounds and lights of the world outside invade the room and suggest both an exotic and romantic atmosphere. It is the world of Port Royale, the Caribbean city that exists only in fantasy. The location throbs with the sounds of a life denied to Jonathan, who is locked away from it. The light, music, and other sounds awaken in Jonathan some primitive longings. Madame Rosepettle’s warping influence...
Absurdism
Although in part a parody, Kopit’s play also makes use of absurdist drama. For example, language falters, making communication difficult, particularly for Jonathan, who stammers and stutters his way through the play. Characters are also dysfunctional and exaggerated types. Madame Rosepettle is a monster of maternalism, for example, while Jonathan, her victim, is a hyperbolic bundle of inhibitions and fears. There is also an irreverent treatment of serious matters, especially love and death. H...
Black Humor
A specific quality of much absurdism in both drama and fiction is black humor, evoked in places in which grotesque elements commingle with serious concerns—especially death. The bellboys who carry in the coffin of Madame Rosepettle’s dead husband comically pull its handles off and drop it on the floor, and later, while Rosalie is attempting to seduce Jonathan, Rosepettle’s corpse becomes a macabre Jack-in-the-box, interrupting the seduction by falling twice from the closet on top of the pair.
The 1960s was a decade of tremendous turmoil and change in the United States. It was a Cold War decade, a period in which the threat of a nuclear
Kopit’s Oh Dad has the distinction of being a relatively rare phenomenon: an extremely successful first work staged in New York by a new and virtually unknown playwright. When Oh Dadopened at New York’s Phoenix Theatre on February 26, 1962, beginning a run of 454 performances, it already had a production history, both in the United States and abroa...
John W. Fiero
Fiero is a retired Ph. D. and former teacher of drama and playwriting at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. In this essay he examines Oh Dad as parodic satire using the techniques of what Kopit himself, in the play’s subtitle, called “a bastard French tradition.” More than any other commercially successful American play identified with the Theatre of the Absurd, Arthur Kopit’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad exemplifies a widely-held belief among...
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
1. Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers(1942) offers a jaundiced view of the American values, institutions, and traditions, including what he calls “momism,” the hypocritical American mother, and sexual mores. 2. Terance McNally’s And Things That Go Bump in the Night (1964) is a play that, like Oh Dad,has absurd, nightmarish elements and deals with a dysfunctional family. 3. Edward Albee’s plays The American Dream (1961) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) are contemporaries of Oh Dadan...
Arthur Ballet
Ballet provides an overview of Kopit’s farce in this essay, explicating the plot and offering a brief history of the play’s creation. The setting is a lavish suite in a Caribbean hotel, where Madame Rosepettle, her son Jonathan, and her dead husband (in a coffin) as well as their very large, carnivorous plants and assorted treasure, have ensconced themselves. Entering their restricted quarters is Commodore Roseabove, who attempts to court Madame Rosepettle, followed by Rosalie, who seduces an...
Brustein, Robert. “The Absurd and the Ridiculous” in the New Republic,Vol. CXLVI, March 19, 1962, p. 31. Buckley, Priscilla L. “Well Now, Let’s See...” in the National Review,Vol. XII, June 6, 1962, p. 416. Clurman, Harold. Review of Oh Dad in the Nation,Vol. CXCIV, March 31, 1962, p. 289. Gilman, Richard. “The Stage: The Absurd and the Foolish” in...
Auerbach, Doris. Sam Shepard, Arthur Kopit, and the Off-Broadway Theater,Twayne, 1982. Bordman, Gerald. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1930-1969, Oxford UniversityPress, 1996. Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd,3rd edition, Peregrine, 1987. Kopit, Arthur. “The Vital Matter of Environment” in Theatre Arts,Vol. XLV, April, ...
Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad: A Pseudoclassical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition; Written by: Arthur Kopit: Date premiered: 1963: Place premiered: United States: Original language: English: Genre: Farce
A widow (Rosalind Russell) takes her son (Robert Morse) and a coffin containing her husband's body on a Jamaican vacation.
- Comedy, Drama
- Rosalind Russell
- Richard Quine
Dec 27, 2021 · Oh, Dad, poor Dad, Mamma's hung you in the closet and I'm feelin' so sad : a pseudoclassical tragifarce in a bastard French tradition : Kopit, Arthur, 1937-2021, author : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.
Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad is a 1967 American black comedy film directed by Richard Quine, based on the 1962 play Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad: A Pseudoclassical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition by Arthur L. Kopit.
