Inspired by erosion of privacy, Kopit crafts net thriller

Arthur Kopit believes in privacy. To interview a man whose latest play "BecauseHeCan" deals with the erosion of privacy in the Information Age and who stands proudly by his belief that "privacy is at the heart of our freedom" would intimidate the most intrepid of interviewers.

Fortunately for this interviewer, Kopit's strong political commitment to privacy does not extend to journalistic interviews. Kopit's easy-going and friendly demeanor helps explain why his day job as playwriting instructor in the Program of Theater and Dance this semester suits him well despite the darker leanings of his night job as a playwright committed to, as he explains in the introduction to a collection of his plays, "find[ing] what is hidden in the shadows, and bring[ing] it out into the light."

Kopit has spent years on this project, making his debut as a professional playwright with the dark comedy "Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet, and I'm Feeling So Sad" in 1959. In this play, what lurks in the shadows is a corpse of the dead father who is, as the title suggests, hung in the closet. With its obvious originality and macabre humor, "Oh Dad, Poor Dad" was a tremendous critical success, earning Kopit an Outer Critics' Circle Award and launching him into an illustrious career that has spanned decades.

His plays include Tony-nominated "Indians" (1969) and "Wings" (1978), and he has written the books for the Maury Yeston musicals, "Nine" — recipient of the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1975 — and "Phantom" (1991). He is currently at work on a new musical with Weston entitled "Tom Swift and the Secrets of the Universe," in addition to developing three short plays of his own that debuted at the Louisville Humana Festival and adapting "BecauseHeCan" into a screenplay.

Kopit's dizzying list of creative projects did not prevent him from taking the time to share his experiences and insights on topics ranging from Bill Clinton to alien abductions. His sense of humor is as quirky and effective in person as it is in his plays, as might be imagined not only from the play's computer quips but also from the Siamese-cat-eating piranha named Rosalinda in "Oh, Dad, Poor Dad." However, Kopit's wit is matched by political passion and engagement. Just as he took on the issue of the Vietnam War and the United States' treatment of Native Americans in his play, "Indians," Kopit takes on a political Goliath in "BecauseHeCan" and freely admits the dangers he sees stemming from the Information Age in government and economics.

As Kopit explains, the inspiration for "BecauseHeCan" arose from the political arena. "The impulse behind 'BecauseHeCan' had nothing to do with technology," he said. "It had to do with my outrage at . . . the Kenneth Starr investigations of Clinton and Lewinsky when Starr tried to subpoena the records showing what books Monica Lewinsky had bought. And I thought the real danger facing the country did not come from anything Clinton had done with Monica Lewinsky but was coming from the seemingly limitless grounds [for investigation] . . . Kenneth Starr was going after anything that might be related to what I felt was trivial."

While Kopit said he does not excuse Clinton's behavior, he must condemn what he calls the "reductive" impulse to "define the totality of a person's life by a certain aspect [of that life]."

Kopit sees such definition as the first step in intimidation, the kind of intimidation Joseph Elliot is victimized by in the play.

"Nobody should worry when you buy books that your choice of literature will be used against you, as if what you read or saw or liked to hear defined you in some way," Kopit said.

His interest in the presidential scandal coincided with his musings about technology and surveillance. Not only can everything be seen by the technologically adept — Kopit shared an anecdote about hackers who told him that if you wanted to bug a friend's apartment, all you have to do is send flowers — but any story can be created about any person and confirmed with digital evidence.

From this germ of fiction-making arose not only Kopit's impulse to write the play but also the character of Astrakahn, whom Kopit sees as a kind of writer himself. "He doesn't just steal credit cards," Kopit said. "He actually creates a masterwork of fiction. He rewrites somebody's life."

For Kopit, "BecauseHeCan" was "an exercise in minimalism." "I wanted to find out what was the very very absolute least I could tell about a couple that lets you believe you know them," he said.

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The audience must piece together the elements of this couple's story and in the process should question the validity of evidence and conjecture. In "BecauseHeCan," Kopit said, he questions "what right . . . anyone [has] to know about others."

"What can they derive from that [evidence]?" he asked. "What can they know about us? And if they know things about us based on data, what happens when they start falsifying the data, and you cannot prove they have falsified it?"

Kopit's global vision may sound bleak. He sees each of us as a potential victim. "In a world in which we are more and more dependent upon digital information, digital storage, as if for safekeeping," Kopit said, "the more vulnerable we are to this data, what you wish to keep secret, what you think you have. Your money is not in dollars; it's in zeroes and ones. It's like a large house of cards. It could all come down."

However, his artistic vision is far from bleak, and he enthusiastically deemed the students in his current playwriting seminar a "very, very, very talented group" and explained that "if another writer was sitting in hearing the stuff, you would not know that this was undergraduate as opposed to graduate school." When asked how he approaches teaching the craft of playwriting, Kopit joked "cautiously," but his approach to teaching is far from flippant. His genuine commitment to the craft of playwriting — he explained that the reason playwright is not spelled "playwrite" is because of that element of craft — reveals itself in his enthusiasm for his students and for creating "an environment where they can find out for themselves how it's done."

Ever anarchic, Kopit eschews the academic goals of a playwriting class, explaining that one of his roles as a teacher is to "make sure they're not writing for the grade, [that] they're writing to develop their ear, their eye, their sensibility, so that you teach yourself."

"You learn by doing," he said. "No theory. Just start doing it, and let's just see how it works." This loose and experimental philosophy could well describe Kopit's own creative and rich imaginative universe, which spans so many different styles and subjects.

Perhaps Kopit's description of his character Astrakahn fits just as well this playwright who propounds political freedoms with as much dedication as he encourages theatrical experimentation and personal artistic growth in his students.

Like Astrakahn, Kopit too is an "outlaw," able to "create and re-create the world," with "strategies to ward off boredom and the mundane." Finally, "only his imagination limits what he can do, and we've not seen an outlaw quite like him."