Mommy Why

Mommy Why?

Mommy, dearest, move over! This mamma’s packed with a live piranha, a man-eating Venus flytrap and her stuffed, dead husband. Oh wait, and who could forget to mention a stamp and coin collection to die for, literally. Any play that starts out with a title, let alone a script, as grotesque as Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad is setting itself an example of kookiness and morbidity, not to mention a style of mystification, hard to live up to. Arthur Kopit wrote Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad while he was studying European theater. His aim was to enter the workforce in a school playwriting contest, never anticipating that it would bring him worldwide acclaim at the age of twenty-three. Kopit’s work won both the contest and an undergraduate production at Harvard. The play opened on February 26, 1962, running for 454 performances, an extraordinary achievement for an unknown playwright with no previous New York production credits. However, I say that much of the play’s previous success was due to the engaging satire of everything from the 1960’s. It was an outrageous time period, and somewhere between civil rights marches, Vietnam, and moon landings, also came some of the oddest plays ever, including Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad. I argue with the previous success of this play, due to the offbeat, dysfunctional characters—especially Madame Rosepetal and her son, Jonathan- it takes away from the assumed seriousness of the play and causes the play to have a lack of purpose. The play’s characters in general lack psychological complexity although they are unforgettable.

Oh Dad, Poor Dad takes place in a luxurious hotel suit on a remote, tropical island. It opens with a squad of bellboys scurrying in, bearing the exotic belongings of Madame Rosepetal and her son, Jonathan. She directs two bellboys to put the coffin in the master bedroom, next to the bed, while other bellboys continue carting in more things, including two black-draped Venus flytraps and mourning drapes. Madame Rosepetal is the kind of woman who sucks the air out of any room she enters. She has many strange quirks, like that fact that she loves to take care of a Piranha that eats Siamese cats. Not to mention that when her husband died, she has him stuffed and she keeps him in a closet. Her son Jonathan is 24 years old, but he acts like he is still seven. His mother keeps him indoors at all times, keeping him busy with stamp collections, coin collections, and a telescope. Madame Rosepetal is pushy, demanding, and insulting to everyone. Jonathan is an obsessive-compulsive collector of stamps and with his blazer jacket, dress shorts and high socks, he is more than a dork -- he's an over-protected son, imprisoned by his mother's tight grasp, unable to make decisions, viewing the world through a telescope. Still, life is just uncomfortable even when the girl next door arrives. She is a cute blonde in a pink dress, but her lust for Jonathan is comically combustible. This leads to a battle of wits between mother and girlfriend, and everything ends in insanity and death.

In this play, Madame Rosepetal, and her sheltered son, Jonathan, are looking to get away from it all. After checking into a hotel on an island, more like invading it, mayhem ensues until dear old dad, literally, falls out of the closet. The play struggled too hard to be eccentric; the absurd concept of a mother who is such a brute that she wears all black, treats her grown-up son like a little boy and takes the stuffed corpse of her husband with her on trips wherever they go is fragile. It is eerie and ghoulish, too. It is also grossly overplayed, the idea of the blood-sucking mother and the thumb-sucking son. The mother was just too extravagant, too bizarre, too vindictive, and too controlling. On the other hand, the son was just way too bland, feeble and sensitive to be a grown man, even if he was supposed to assume the role of the neurotic son. Overall, I honestly would not go and see this production again, this play was bad, but it had so much