"Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You In The Closet And I'm Feeling So Sad"
by Arthur Kopit
Directed by: Natasha Williams
May 16-19, 23-26
Ticket Price: $15.00
May 17th Pay what you can performance
May 18 Student Night (Students $10)
Dining Seating 5:30-7:15, Theatre Seating 7:45, Curtains at 8:00
Reservations call 859-259-2754 or visit beetnik.com.
Starring
Ryan Case
Will Swisher
Jesse Rebecca Pavlovic
Edmund Desiato
Blake Sugarman
Randy Hall
Garett Wilson
Miles Conger
Mason R Reeves
Arthur Kopit wrote Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad as a parody— "a pseudo-classical tragifarce in a bastard French tradition"-- joining, at the age of twenty three, the ranks of such famous avant-garde playwrights as Arthur Adamov, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett.
The play was first presented in Harward in 1960. It was so well received by the audience and the critics that it was soon moved to the commercial stages, including the Phoenix Theatre in New York, a major Off-Broadway house that staged alternative theater works, where it ran for 454 performances – an unprecedented success for a young playwright with no previous New York credits.
Though in 1960s this witty and largely absurd play seemed devoid of serious thoughts and deep meaning, the subsequent forty years of studies of violence and abuse and their origins inspired contemporary theatre to reconsider the dramaturgy of the play, and uncover a complex, dark and tragic undercurrent in this comedic story of a dysfunctional mother and son, and their interaction with the world around them.