ARTHUR KOPIT 1999

Like some of Kopit’s other plays, Y2K is a social commentary with a hint of darkness. Through a computer, a man and wife, with a perhaps not highly moral sexual history, are thrown into another reality where everything they do or don’t do is blown out of proportion. The main action of the play is interrupted by the memory sequences of Costa Astrakhan, a self-centered teenager who, if not insane, is delighted by the power a computer can give him. While these sequences seem more like a sexual fantasy than reality, Astrakhan translates them into digital fact. The devastation to the married couple that follows is sudden and complete; while the Secret Service is aware of Astrakhan’s actions, Astrakhan himself seems to have escaped capture at the end of the play.

While Y2K does touch on the horror of identity theft and the dangers of privacy invasion in the digital age, the main theme is how revenge (in this case, Astrakhan’s revenge upon Joseph, who has kicked Astrakhan out of his class) can take on a new form through technology. From his depiction of unscrupulous federal agents to his portrayal of an implacable computer hacker, Kopit shows that power corrupts. He places the focus on the abuse of authority, which happens simply because it is possible.

Arthur Kopit

Born May 10, 1937, in New York City, New York, Arthur Kopit is a contemporary American playwright who is sensitive to the honor and the humiliation of the human condition. His first successful play, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, debuted in 1960.

Kopit is the son of George and Maxine (Dubin) Kopit; his father was a jeweler in Long Island, New York. When Kopit enrolled in Harvard University, he was interested in engineering, but he soon found that he had a talent for the arts. During his college years, Kopit won two playwriting contests. He directed six of his seven plays that were produced at Harvard.

The Questioning of Nick, Kopit’s first one-act drama, was a serious play about teenage rebellion written during the spring of 1957 for Dunster House Drama Workshop at Harvard University. Don Juan in Texas, Kopit’s witty turn on the American Western, was also written in 1957. In 1958, Kopit wrote On the Runway of Life, You Never Know What’s Coming Off Next, which features a fifteen-year-old boy seeking adventure in a carnival. In 1958 Kopit also wrote Across the River and into the Jungle, a parody of Ernest Hemingway’s 1950 novel Across the River and into the Trees.

Other Kopit plays include Gemini (1957), Aubad (1959), Sing to Me through Open Windows (1959), To Dwell in a Place of Strangers (1959), Asylum: or What the Gentlemen Are Up To, and As for the Ladies (1963), The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis (1965), Indians (1968), Wings (1978), End of the World with Symposium to Follow (1984), and Road to Nirvana (1991). For his musical Nine, Kopit won the Best Musical Tony award in 1982.

At the close of the twentieth century, Kopit wrote Y2K, which deals with the threat the Internet poses to personal privacy. According to the preface he wrote for the play, Kopit was inspired in 1999 by the investigation into then-president Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. The play conveys the fear of having one’s reality suddenly changed by outside forces.

Ranging from explorations of serious issues to satire, Kopit’s plays expose the elements of daily life, whether they are cruel, whimsical, or threatening.

Kopit is married to Leslie Ann Garis and has three children: Alex, Ben, and Kathleen. He graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 1959 and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He is also a member of the Writer’s Guild of America, the Dramatists Guild, the Hasty Pudding Society, and the Signet Society.

Y2K begins with Astrakhan in the spotlight on stage, stating that he is everywhere and on the hunt. Like the Greek chorus, Astrakhan introduces the play, explains the action, and concludes the drama.

Secret Service agents Orin Slake and Dennis McAlvane have taken Joseph Elliot to an abandoned warehouse that smells of dead meat in New York City’s Soho neighborhood. Just as in classic spy thrillers when the person being interrogated is under a bright light, Joseph is sitting under a single bulb.

The two agents allow Joseph to call his lawyer but refuse to give him their names. Slake and Page 341  |  Top of ArticleMcAlvane ask Joseph apparently nonsensical questions about names and whether he has had any contact with someone who calls himself ISeeU. Joseph says that neither he nor his wife Joanne is acquainted with anyone who has identified himself in that way.

Astrakhan declares that he can see everything and that no one can hide from him.

The spotlight moves to the Elliots. Joseph tries to tell Joanne about his interrogation, but she tells him about his daughter Emma’s receiving a crank call, which sounded as though it were in Joseph’s voice.

The lights return to Astrakhan. With increasing arrogance, Astrakhan states that he is a “Master of Downloading.” He admits to toying with others through his knowledge of computers.

As the action returns to the Elliots, Joseph explains his interrogation. Joanne reveals why she was unable to listen to Joseph earlier: she has had a run-in with her ex-husband, Francis Summerhays. An indication of Joseph’s mistrust of his wife surfaces as he questions her as to whether she is still in love with Francis. After Joanne reassures him, the couple embraces.

Astrakhan returns to the spotlight and gives details on Joanne’s history, including her supposed affair with Joseph while Joseph’s wife was dying of cancer.

Slake and McAlvane appear in Joseph’s office, and their questions about his computer use turn into threats of arrest. An interesting fact in this scene is that Joseph apparently publishes books that might attract the attention of the authorities. The book Mapplethorpe (an apparent reference to the controversial artist Robert Mapplethorpe, known for his homoerotic photographs) is one McAlvane thinks that Joseph should not be proud of. This gives possible support to Astrakhan’s later claim that Joseph loved the plagiarized pornographic story that Astrakhan submitted in class as his own work.

During this second interrogation, Astrakhan interrupts from time to time to explain how he targets someone through a computer. At the end of the scene, he claims that he had a lurid affair with Joseph’s wife after becoming one of Joseph’s students in a writing class. His memory, Astrakhan says, becomes “clearer” each time he goes over the details, which is a hint that perhaps he is embellishing.

This sequence is presented as a memory, but it is presented by Astrakhan; therefore, it is very likely that what actually happened is very different from what is presented.

Astrakhan arrives in the Elliots’s living room. He claims that he is fifteen but that drug use has made him seem older. Instead of finding this alarming, Joseph is flattered into thinking that he has been responsible for stopping Astrakhan’s drug use. Both Joseph and Joanne have read and are impressed by the pornographic story Astrakhan wrote for Joseph’s class, and Joanne is particularly delighted by its filthiness. Soon she is seducing Astrakhan by displaying herself unclothed in front of him. Joanne says that Joseph tells his students, “Everything you invent is true,” which seems to be something Astrakhan has adopted as his mantra. The sequence ends with Joanne’s rejection of Astrakhan.

Joseph is even more suspicious of his wife, for he questions her about a trip she took to see her mother. He explains how he unintentionally gave Astrakhan access to their identities. When Joseph talks about connecting to Joanne’s computer, it seems to be an allusion to his sexual possession of his wife, because he says that he found it stimulating.

In between drinks, Joseph tells Joanne that Astrakhan has usurped their identities and made her into a porno star and him into a child molester. Joanne immediately says that allegations of molestation against Joseph are ridiculous, but it is evident that Joseph half-believes the allegations against her. He produces photos, which she tries, unconvincingly, to discredit. Then Joseph tells her that Astrakhan has falsified records to make it look like he is the son of Joseph and his first wife.

Admitting that there is some truth in some of the things that Astrakhan has invented about him, Joseph tells Joanne he is sure that the situation is similar for her. Because they are penniless (Astrakhan has stolen all their money after stealing their identities), Joseph says that they are unable to follow Joanne’s suggestion that they hire a private detective to find Astrakhan. Instead, he suggests that she resign from her job as he did from his. His mistrust of her is evident.

Astrakhan ends the scene as the spotlight moves to him. He is triumphant that things will be as he remembers them.

Astrakhan is a teenager who is obsessed with asserting his own importance. He associates nearly everything with sexuality, including his need to control others. As he strives to bolster his ego, Astrakhan is, in his own words, “as relentless as the wrath of God.” But unlike God, Astrakhan does not care what the truth is; he would rather make up his own version of events. In Astrakhan, there is no recognition of factual reality, because whatever he says is “honest,” according to him, whether it is completely contrived or partially accurate.

Astrakhan is nineteen, but he is so wasted and haunted that he looks more like he’s in his middle twenties. His hair is neon blue; some actors, however, have chosen to portray him with hair sticking on up on end or wearing a peaked cap. His shoes are of electric green suede and his sunglasses are almond-shaped. He wears a T-shirt that says “Nemesis.” His leather pants and leather jacket are reminiscent of those worn by Mel Gibson in Road Warrior.

Astrakhan provides many of the details about the Elliots, the main characters. As an unreliable source, he cannot be trusted to be giving completely accurate information, although Joseph recognizes that some of the details are factual.

A student in Joseph’s writing class who was kicked out for plagiarism, Astrakhan does not seem to have a grasp on what is real and what is not. He makes up information, blending it with bits of truth until fact and fiction are almost indistinguishable. Joanne says that Astrakhan is obviously insane; if so, he is also very clever, for he is able to completely obliterate the Elliots’s real identities as well as their bank accounts.

Astrakhan goes by several aliases. He has attracted the attention of the Secret Service by his ability to hack into computers and create digital identities. He creates identities for the Elliots that make them seem more despicable than they perhaps really are. He also makes it seem as if he is Joseph’s son by his first wife.

See Costa Astrakhan

Joanne is an enigmatic woman who wishes to be “tethered” to the one she loves. Her idea of love is of being “sheltered” by the strength of her lover. She seems to be constantly trying to reassure her husband that she is true to him while at the same time being a bit defiant about it. Although she explains to Joseph that she loves him, she admits that at one time she loved her ex-husband.

Joanne is in her late thirties. Her maiden name is Joanne Elizabeth Simpson. Both her parents were university professors: her father taught moral philosophy and her mother taught the flute. There may be some irony in Joanne’s background because it is so seemingly innocent and wholesome, yet Joanne displays a knowledge of coarse behavior that scarcely matches this picture.

If played by an American actress, Joanne is supposed to have been born October 15, 1961, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and to have graduated in 1983 from Princeton. If played by a British actress, she is supposed to have been born in a small town not far from the University of Manchester and to have graduated from Oxford. Her major was art history; she works at Sotheby’s auction house as an administrative assistant specializing in jade and Chinese porcelain.

Joanne’s first husband, Francis Summerhays, has been harassing her. He is a venture capitalist whom she met at an Asian art auction. The marriage lasted less than a year, and even though Francis supposedly has been calling Joanne incessantly and leaving disgusting messages, she still believes he is capable of acting like a perfect gentleman. Whether Francis is actually doing everything Joanne says he is, is difficult to determine. How much Joanne can be trusted is questionable since she admits to lying at least once in the play.

Joanne supposedly met and pursued Joseph while she and he were still married to their first partners. Information about her moral character is contradictory, so it seems possible, although not definite, that this is true. While she calls Joseph her rock and chastises him for blasphemy, she herself uses crass language. All in all, it is possible that her behavior may not be as pure as she would like Joseph to think.

According to Astrakhan, Joanne had an affair with him after she married Joseph. He says that she had eight encounters just to satisfy her lust and then told Astrakhan it was over. Also according to Astrakhan, Joanne loves filthy books; however, she shows a definite distaste for pornography.

Whether Joanne is without any moral scruples is hard to determine; that she is capable of committing adultery seems somewhat likely since she was willing to get into a limousine with her ex-husband and to lie to Joseph about it. Like Joseph, she seems to turn to vodka throughout the play. Also like Joseph, she seems fixated on sexual topics and crude language.

Joseph is an editor at Random House. He seems concerned about whether his wife is faithful to him. Although he seems to want to believe that she is not capable of immoral behavior, he has his doubts. He tries to convince a Secret Service agent that his wife is not the kind of woman to use foul language, but he obviously knows this is not necessarily the case, since at the same time he adds, “Who can say how her youth was spent?” Even though he is extremely defensive when the agent suggests that ISeeU (Astrakhan) knows his wife, Joseph’s suspicions that Joanne is capable of cheating on him frequently surface. While he exhibits jealousy and questions his wife’s actions, Joseph does not examine his own behaviors very closely.

Joseph is in his early fifties. He drinks quite a bit throughout the play, starting with a vodka and tonic and apparently ending with straight vodka. He also refers to having been drinking Bloody Marys on the day he inadvertently gave Astrakhan access to his computer. He seems to urge drinks on his wife throughout the play.

Joseph’s first wife, Annabel, died of cancer. While she was undergoing chemotherapy, Annabel became pregnant and chose to have an abortion in Paris. Astrakhan claims the child was actually delivered; he has falsified documents to show that he is the child.

Joseph’s daughter, Emma, is Annabel’s daughter. She is in Paris when the play starts and tells Joanne that she has received an obscene phone call that sounded like her father’s voice. At the age of twelve, Emma supposedly refused to attend her father’s second wedding, which, if true, may indicate that Joseph’s behavior to his first wife was less than exemplary.

Just how much Joseph tells the truth is somewhat obscured. When questioned by federal agents, he claims that he does not have much use for his computer; yet he not only has a computer, he also bought one for his wife. When talking to Joanne, he calls his computer a “lovely new machine” and admits that he likes visiting Web sites. Yet he tells Slake and McAlvane that he doesn’t have difficulty resisting the urge to go online.

See Costa Astrakhan

See Costa Astrakhan

McAlvane is in the Secret Service and seems intent upon pleasing his superior, Slake. He is quick to speak in Slake’s direction and quick to act at Slake’s request. Without really showing a personality of his own, McAlvane is eager to display a knowledge of Slake’s methods and desires. Slake calls him “Mac” and seems to look upon him as a promising protégé.

McAlvane is a bit younger than Slake, which would put him in his thirties. He is the junior federal agent investigating Astrakhan’s activities. Described by Kopit as a trainee trying to emulate Slake, McAlvane does not take the initiative in the two sessions in which he and Slake question Joseph. He is like an echo, repeating what Slake says and reinforcing his arguments. When he does take the lead in talking about sending the Elliots to jail, he receives a mild reproof from Slake. Immediately, McAlvane takes his cue, agreeing with Slake’s adjustment to his statement about Joanne being the most likely one to be imprisoned as long as Joseph cooperates.

Slake is supposed to look as if he is in his forties. Dressed in a dark, undistinguished suit and tie, he has an open, friendly face and easy smile. He even pretends that he would be willing to conduct the interview with Joseph in a restaurant. This demeanor is deceptive, however. Slake is very serious about his job, which is to investigate the computer fraud perpetrated by Astrakhan, otherwise known as “ISeeU” or “BCuzICan.”

Like Astrakhan, Slake is not above snooping and knows that Joseph has a lunch appointment at Page 344  |  Top of Articlethe Gramercy Tavern in an hour. He also indicates that he has records as to exactly how much time Joseph spends on the Internet. His name, “Slake,” may suggest that he must satisfy his desire to know all about the case.

Displaying a veneer of geniality that thinly masks his zeal for closing in on his prey, Slake tells Joseph to stop “pretending” and to admit the truth. He insinuates that Joanne is involved in something illegal and will be arrested even if Joseph is not. Slake’s main role seems to be that of interrogator, the kind who assumes guilt whether it is present or not.

Illusion is something magicians make a living creating, and Astrakhan makes a life of it. To himself, he appears bigger than life, almost godlike. In reality, he is a criminal whom federal agents are trying to apprehend. He toys with them, keeping up the appearance of power and control.

In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the heroine, Rosalind, poses as a man and hides her true appearance from the man she loves. So too does Joanne keep back her true nature from her husband. She may have a scandalous past, as the pictures Joseph shows her seem to indicate, but she never admits to it. Although she complains to Joseph that she is “staggered at how little” he understands her, Joanne seems to prefer to maintain appearances that make it impossible for him to truly know her. Joseph also is interested in maintaining appearances. He is elusive about his computer use, claiming that he prefers to write things out by hand. It seems likely that he publishes works of dubious merit.

The question of faithfulness is key in the Elliots’ marriage. They were not faithful to their first spouses, so how can they be sure they are faithful to each other? Joanne does seem to have a little more contact with her ex-husband, Francis, than is normal, and Joseph is fixated on whether she is cheating on him. He even asks her if she gets a charge from the indecent way Francis talks to her.

Jealousy is already Joseph’s weak point, but Astrakhan adds fuel to the fire when he manufactures evidence (if it is manufactured) of a sexual liaison between himself and Joanne. Like Iago, who stirs up Othello’s mistrust of Desdemona in Shakespeare’s play Othello, Astrakhan incites Joseph’s suspicions of his wife. These suspicions seem to be confirmed by the photos that Astrakhan has made available, though Joseph knows that Astrakhan has invented some incorrect information about his own fidelity.

At the core of every human being is identity. People spend years defining who they are. They decide where to go to college, what to choose as a career, and whom to marry. They build reputations, assets, and credit histories. All that the Elliots have built is wiped out with Astrakhan’s computer hacking. In changing their identities, Astrakhan is usurping them.

Troubled by a lack of self-esteem and recognition, Astrakhan decides that he is not satisfied with his parents. His mother, Glenda, was a dental hygienist and sometime prostitute killed by her former husband, a tap dancer with Tourette’s Syndrome (an inherited, neurological disorder characterized by repeated involuntary movements and uncontrollable vocal sounds, often including profanity). Astrakhan decides that they are not his real parents, so he rewrites history to become Joseph’s son. He promises to take care of his new “parents” with the financial resources he has stolen from them. The Elliots lose their identities, and Astrakhan gains a new one.

Computer technology is a useful tool in Y2K. Joanne keeps a journal on the computer. Joseph uses it to research material he is about to publish. But as they go about using the technology, they become vulnerable. Their innermost thoughts and feelings are exposed for someone else to use against them.

As home computers become networked to global servers, society in the twenty-first century becomes increasingly threatened by privacy invasion. As Keith Regan points out in E-Commerce Times, if a person has an e-mail address, someone is selling information about that person to the highest bidder. People prefer to think that their information remains in one place. The Elliots apparently believed that until it was too late.

Though a company may assure customers that their personal data will not be sold to others, the fact is that when a company changes hands, most likely Page 345  |  Top of Articlethe information, too, will be sold. There is no telling exactly where the information will end up, as Joseph learns.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, although computer technology makes it easier for companies to share information, it also makes it easier for law enforcement to track down criminals and prevent fraud. It advises, however, that people take precautions as to how much information they submit online. Perhaps such a warning is too late for most people. In Kopit’s Y2K, the damage was done quickly, and it was apparently irreversible.

A distrusting couple, the Elliots have both been married before and seem a little uncomfortable in their second marriage. Perhaps that is because they committed adultery together while they were married to their previous spouses. Or perhaps it is because neither one can resist sexual impropriety.

Joseph and Joanne accuse each other of sexual liaisons with other people. They use very coarse terms to communicate. Elyse Sommer points out in Curtain Up that the way Joseph and Joanne talk to each other is not the way people normally talk to each other.

Charles McNulty notes in Village Voice that Y2K is “erotically charged.” Demonstrations of affection and love between Joseph and Joanne almost seem out of place, because the language they use with each other is lewd rather than respectful. Whether the sexual impropriety is mostly just talk or whether there is substance behind it is not certain, but it is a prevalent theme that drives the play.

Y2K is a contemporary drama narrated by Astrakhan, a teenager with the ability to hack into computers but apparently with little else in the way of accomplishments. He invents a number of events and details, so he is not a reliable narrator. Since he is also the villain of the piece, his purpose seems to be to create the story as well as to tell it.

The play proceeds in a disjointed style, with past and present blending together. Astrakhan’s version of reality becomes dominant, so that it is

difficult to determine if he invented most of the events, especially those that are explicitly sexual. At the end of the drama, Astrakhan’s version of what happened has become a digital reality that the Elliots must cope with.

Set at the end of 1999, Y2K takes place just before the new millennium. There is considerable concern that computers not programmed to function in years with dates beyond 1999 will disrupt many of the normal functions of society. A book Joseph is about to publish, Crisis, predicts doom. Joseph questions whether this prediction is accurate. The physical settings vary from the ordinary to the eerie. For the most part, the play takes place in the Elliots’s living room or in Joseph’s office. But the Page 346  |  Top of Articleplay starts in an abandoned warehouse, a setting in which the Secret Service agents seem comfortable but in which Joseph is not.

Y2K deals with sexual indiscretions and how destructive they can be when made public. Joseph Elliot discovers that the computer age makes both discovering and using such information easier; he compares the situation to a house of cards that is “ready to come toppling at the slightest wind.” One of Astrakhan’s aliases is “BCuzICan.” Kopit shows that once this kind of ammunition exists, it will be used, simply because it can be. The subject matter of the play was inspired by Kenneth Starr’s investigation into Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions and his later testimony about them, according to Kopit’s preface.

In June 1995, Monica Lewinsky began an internship at the White House. In mid-January 1998, FBI agents questioned Lewinsky about whether she had had a sexual relationship with then-president Bill Clinton. The next day, in a deposition he gave in another case involving allegations of sexual misconduct with Paula Jones, Clinton denied that he had had sexual relations with Lewinsky. The story of a possible affair with Lewinsky, and lying to cover it up, broke to the media just four days later, and the scandal escalated from there.

Federal independent counsel Kenneth Starr expanded his investigation of the Paula Jones suit to include Lewinsky. He filed a motion on April 14, 1998, to compel testimony about Lewinsky’s relationship with Clinton from Secret Service agents. Starr also wanted to question Lewinsky, and she agreed to answer Starr’s questions in return for immunity from prosecution. She testified before a grand jury on August 6, 1998, that she had had a sexual relationship with Clinton.

After a lengthy and expensive investigation into his relationship with Lewinsky and into statements he had made under oath about that relationship, Clinton was impeached. On December 19, 1998, the House of Representatives passed two articles of impeachment against him, with eleven counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power. Clinton was the second president of the United States to be impeached while in office. (Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868.)

Impeachment is one step in the process that may lead to a public official being removed from office, if the official is also convicted of the crimes for which he or she is impeached. Because Clinton was not convicted, he was not removed from office. As he finished his term in January 2001, Clinton avoided indictment for lying under oath by agreeing to pay $25,000 in fines and accepting a five-year suspension of his license to practice law.

Y2K stands for Year 2000. (K is an abbreviation for thousand.) In the late 1990s, there was growing fear that computers whose built-in, two-digit calendars were not programmed to recognize 00 as signifying the year 2000 would fail to operate beginning at midnight on January 1 of that year. Since computers are involved in providing most services necessary to modern cities, businesses, and residences, there was a great deal of concern about what systems would fail and what the results might be. Some of the concerns included loss of computer data, loss of utilities and power, loss of telephone services, breakdowns in transportation (including air-control systems), and the resulting social and economic chaos.

In Time Bomb 2000, written to help people prepare for the possible disruption in their lives, Edward and Jennifer Yourdon advised people to “spend the remaining months until the new millennium paring down and simplifying your life, so that you can face it with as much flexibility as possible.” And they were among the more moderate voices. The anticipated problems did not develop, however. Virtually all computer systems were upgraded to recognize 00 as the year 2000 before the date changed. The new millennium was celebrated around the world with no major disruptions in services.

Many reviewers regarded Y2K as inferior to Kopit’s other notable works, such as Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Page 347  |  Top of ArticleMama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, Wings, and Indians. John Simon wrote in New York Magazine that Y2K is not a believable story and not of the same quality as Kopit’s respected works. McNulty observed in Village Voice,“Kopit makes things somewhat more confusing than he needs to.” Sommer in CurtainUp called Y2K”a thriller that fails to thrill” and compared it unfavorably to John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation and Craig Lucas’s Dying Gaul, complaining that Kopit’s play “has none of the complexity and depth of either.” She concluded, “Presumably the resolution that never comes is intended to leave you pondering the issue of our eroding privacy.... In point of fact, you’re simply left feeling you’ve had an unsatisfying meal that didn’t even offer a dessert.”

Writing in Variety, Charles Isherwood allowed, “The play turns on authentically disturbing questions. “He added, though, “Kopit doesn’t deeply explore these issues. He’s content to tell a scary story, without examining the larger issues it raises.” Isherwood concluded by agreeing with Sommer that “the play seems slight indeed, and even a little half-baked.”

On the other hand, some critics welcomed Y2K as an exploration of the moral risks of the information age. Jeffrey Eric Jenkins, writing in Seattle Post-Intelligencer, called the play “riveting, paranoic, and plausible.” Martin F. Kohn of the Detroit Free Press described it as “a chilling play that taps into whatever millennial angst is floating nearby.”

Schulthies is an editor who holds a master’s degree in English literature and teaches English at the community college level. In the following essay, she examines surrealistic evil and its harmful effects in Kopit’s play.

Arthur Kopit’s contemporary drama Y2K creates a feeling of lurking evil in a surrealistic setting. Kopit suggests an ominous unreality that hints at, rather than shouts of, potential danger. The evil feels close at hand because it “lives” in personal computers,

Playbill cover from the 1999 theatrical production of Y2K, directed by Bob Balaban

which people keep in their private homes. As people use their computers, they reveal personal information in e-mails and in their Internet use. In Y2K, Kopit poses the question, what if the most personal details of people’s lives could be tapped into and used against them?

Computers “talk” to one another at high speeds, networks record messages sent and received, and information of all kinds is submitted and accepted. But, as Kopit points out, information is also being tracked. Personal profiles are collected and saved. “Cookies” store strings of text on a user’s computer in order to monitor the user’s activities. Servers record the Internet Protocol address of the user and sometimes link it to personal information. As his drama progresses, Kopit shows that as people are served by the computer, the computer is serving others who may be evil.

Kopit’s Y2K shows the disastrous effects of privacy invasion in the technological age. When Joseph Elliot uses his computer, he is unaware of the lurking presence of someone bent on revenge. But other eyes can monitor his progress through a Web site and keep track of his preferences and personal data. Later Joseph is shocked to find out that using

his computer opened the door to prying eyes, because, as he relates to his wife, he thought the computer was his “FRIEND.”

Joseph and his wife learn that there are eyes eagerly compiling all the personal data they can. As their daily lives crumble like so many bits of scrambled data, the Elliots enter a surrealistic world, haunted by the fact that their personal identities are not their own.

Among the billions of people on the earth, many use computers on a daily basis. The scope for privacy invasion is vast and frightening. In Y2K, Kopit skims the surface of such a possibility, using a villain who respects no one and who recognizes no limits. Inspired by the way Kenneth Starr pursued Monica Lewinsky after her affair with President Clinton, Kopit displays a personal vendetta that destroys the lives of others.

In his preface to the drama, Kopit writes that he was impressed by what he called Starr’s “fascism.” Webster’s dictionary defines fascism as “a strongly nationalistic regime characterized by regimentation, rigid censorship, and suppression of opposition.” Kopit sees these qualities in the political environment that allowed Kenneth Starr to examine the most intimate details of Lewinsky’s life.

Y2K starts off in an abandoned warehouse, where Joseph is being questioned by two Secret Service men. It is an unbelievable setting and an unbelievable circumstance; Joseph is being interrogated, but interrogated with unlikely, nonsensical questions that he does not appear to understand. This is followed by a scene in which Joseph learns that his daughter has called his apartment and said that she received an obscene phone call from someone who sounded like him.

Unreality follows unreality in such a tangle that it is hard to make sense of the facts. Most of the play takes place in the living room of Joseph and Joanne, who are both in their second marriage. In what is supposedly a private domain, the two are watched by the play’s villain, the young and vindictive Costa Astrakhan.

Suffering from an apparent God complex, Astrakhan is an outrageous figure with neon hair and neon shoes. He has a taste for power that he is only able to satisfy through the computer. “And though you cannot see where I really am, I can see all of you,” Astrakhan gloats.

Astrakhan is infuriated over being accused of cheating, though he admits to the audience he has cheated. Expelled from Joseph Elliot’s class for plagiarism, Astrakhan decides that no one can hide from him. Through technology, he has the power to slake his desire for revenge.

As Kopit notes in his preface, the pursuit of Monica Lewinsky by Kenneth Starr was something Kopit found alarming. With his penchant for prying, Astrakhan seems to represent Kenneth Starr. If so, then Astrakhan’s evil madness would reflect a kind of diabolical insanity that Kopit saw in Starr. Just as Starr based his investigation on actual events that were nonetheless denied, so too does Astrakhan base his attack on recorded facts.

Astrakhan is a demented figure of malice. His grasp of reality is so minimal that it is impossible to tell whether there is any real reason for his act of revenge or whether he invented it. Certainly he seems to have no conscience. Kopit seems to indicate that therein lies the danger: if someone has the ability to spy on others, he probably will, whether there is justification for it or not. Evil will take command.

The setting for the play feels unreal partly because what happens and what doesn’t happen is unclear. The audience sees things that one character remembers but another does not. One moment the Elliots seem like a devoted couple, and the next they are insulting each other. At times there is warmth and understanding between them, and at others there is animosity. It is difficult to determine whether they are to be pitied; they almost seem to become part of the evil that is haunting them.

Kopit shows that reality is a fragile thing. Joanne admits to Joseph that she got into a limousine with her ex-husband, Francis Summerhays, because it was raining. Her husband finds his wife’s behavior extraordinary and questions her on it. Page 349  |  Top of ArticleAfter all, she had just been comparing Francis to a vampire. Does Joanne really despise her ex-husband? Or is she fascinated by him? As for Joseph, he seems overly adamant about how little he uses a computer. Does he really only turn on his computer only every once in awhile, or does he use it for something that might be embarrassing? What is true?

Unreal circumstances plague Y2K. Bits of reality mix with complete fiction in such a way that the real story is unclear. Both Joanne and Joseph are unsure of events, but so, too, is the audience. Did Joanne have an affair with Joseph’s male student? She certainly seems to think it more likely that Joseph would have an affair with one of his female students. Do either of the Elliots know with certainty that the other is a moral, decent person? After all, they supposedly had an affair together while Joseph’s first wife was dying of cancer.

Kopit seems to be saying that perhaps no one’s life should be scrutinized too closely. Joseph and Joanne feel the impact on their personal relationships as they focus on how little they trust each other rather than on how they can start reclaiming their lives. Misery fills them, as neither knows how many of the lies Astrakhan invents have a basis in truth.

Joanne tells her husband that they can explain that all of the information is false—information on the computer that indicates that she is practically a prostitute and that he is a sex offender. But her husband replies, “But all of it is not fake.... Is it?”

All this doubt is substantiated by the slipperiness of Y2K’s characters. There is no real reason to believe that Joanne and Joseph would not do any of the lewd things that are hinted at. After all, both of them use language that indicates a lack of sensitivity to each other, so it is not difficult to believe that they are inured to what is decent and what is not. On the other hand, there is quite a bit of evidence that the two genuinely care about each other, as when Joanne goes to comfort her husband when he is remembering his first wife’s pregnancy during her chemotherapy. It seems unlikely that either would behave in a way calculated to hurt the other.

But the suspicion is there; evil has entered. When the incriminating photos make an appearance, Joanne at first denies they are real and then recalls that at least one of them may be. When she is asked if she really did make advances to Astrakhan, Joanne denies it, saying, “It’s the sort of thing I generally remember. Joseph, have you lost your mind?”

Astrakhan is the supreme figure of evil in the play. He goes by a number of aliases, including “ISeeU.” While he is watching others, Astrakhan clearly is not very much aware of himself. He invents a whole history in which he is the son of Joseph’s first wife, Annabel. He plagiarizes a pornographic story and then claims it is an autobiography. He “remembers” having an affair with Joanne, who says she scarcely recalls meeting him. The question of how much of what he remembers is invention and how much is based on truth is never answered.

Strange as the circumstances are, the characters are stranger yet. They seem intent on sexual encounters, whether imagined or real, in a manner that seems to mirror the Starr investigation. The lines between what actually occurred and what didn’t are blurred. Joanne either went to see her mother or made up the trip as a cover for an illicit encounter; Joseph either used his computer as a paperweight or used it for something far less serviceable; Astrakhan either invented his encounters with, and dismissal by, Joanne or was simply recalling something Joanne preferred to forget.

If there was any clarity to the Elliots’ lives to begin with, there certainly is none by the end of the play. The two become a mere invention, victims of the kind of abuse perpetrated by computer hackers. “We are nothing but abstractions now—strings of digits, signifying anything you want, floating in the ether,” Joseph tells his wife.

Purposely playing on the fear of having identities recreated by someone with malignant intent, Kopit blends the known and the unknown so that the truth is impossible to detect. Unreality pervades, and evil is a felt but ill-defined presence. Reputation, finances, and trust vanish before the victims understand what is happening. The computer—the trusted and seemingly benign servant—has become a corrupt master.

Source: April Schulthies, Critical Essay on Y2K, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Poquette has a bachelor of arts degree in English and specializes in writing drama and film. In the following essay, Poquette explores Kopit’s manipulation of truth and reality.

Today, as never before, ordinary people can acquire the power to reshape the reality of a person’s life—by becoming computer hackers. In Kopit’s Y2K, the Page 350  |  Top of Articleplaywright elevates hacking to an art form, in the process challenging the audience’s definition of truth in the digital age.

The nineteen-year-old computer hacker in Y2K, Costa Astrakhan, who is also the play’s narrator, addresses the audience early in the play: “With what I know, I can go anywhere, and you can too.”

For the duration of the play, Astrakhan demonstrates to the audience exactly how to alter a person’s life in cyberspace, using Joseph and Joanne Elliot as his real-life tutorial. By the end of the play, Astrakhan has revised the Elliots’ respective lives so that Joseph, a Random House book editor and teacher, is a child pornographer, while Joanne, who works at Sotheby’s, the famous art auction house, is “a kind of porno star.” Says Joseph to his wife: “And now it seems he has revised my life. No, rewritten it. I’ve got a whole new history, Joanne.”

It is an ironic twist of events for Joseph, a man who has made much of his fortune editing others’ stories. He says as much to his wife:

Through his computer hacking, Kopit arms Astrakhan with a new-age model for storytelling, a real-life story on a grand scale that surpasses the impact of any other medium. Books, plays, films—all of these artistic creations require the reader or viewer to transport themselves inside the world of the story. But in Astrakhan’s digital story, the audience is the entire world, and the characters are real-life people who face real-life consequences—not figments of an author’s imagination.

“We are nothing but abstractions now—strings of digits, signifying anything you want, floating in the ether,” Joseph says to Joanne.

In this era of modern drama, where the boundaries of realism have been tested for more than a hundred years, Kopit breaks through into new territory, creating an art form for the new millennium—the scripting of reality itself. In the beginning, however, the audience watching Kopit’s play doesn’t suspect that this is what Astrakhan is doing, in part due to his style of keep-no-secrets narration. As Katie Hafner of the New York Times notes to Kopit in an e-mail interview, “[Astrakhan is] a classic unreliable narrator.”

Throughout the play, Astrakhan seems to be upfront and honest, telling people both bad and good things about himself, when in fact he is a liar. As Kopit says in his e-mail interview, “Generally, we assume that when someone says something in a seemingly honest way, it’s true—or at least what that person thinks is true.” Astrakhan’s forthright and direct manner is put in an even better light when contrasted with the Elliots, who aren’t always truthful with each other. This helps to sway the audience into believing that Astrakhan’s narration of current and past events—which the audience is seeing brought to life on stage—is in fact correct. For a large portion of the play, the audience assumes that Joanne has had an affair with Astrakhan, who describes the sordid details of their affair in vivid and specific detail. Says Astrakhan, “Am I being indiscrete? I’m sorry but there’s no avoiding it. Not if honesty is to be our policy. And truth to be told.”

It is a complete shock to the audience to find out that Joanne doesn’t even recall meeting Astrakhan. Up until this point, the audience thinks they are getting more accurate information than the Elliots since Astrakhan confides in the audience constantly. This final, long scene, in which Joseph describes the particulars of how Astrakhan has ruined their lives, is the turning point in the play, where both the Elliots and the audience realize that they’ve been had. “Strategically, Kopit wants to challenge the solidity of both the Elliots’ and the audience’s sense of reality,” said John Lahr in his review in the New Yorker.

Astrakhan’s tendency to have false memories is particularly interesting since he is so adamant about telling the truth. The play is saturated with references to honesty and truth, and many of them are from Astrakhan, emphasizing to the audience that he is an honest person. Astrakhan addresses the audience: “I only tell the truth. That’s because lying is obscene.” And yet Astrakhan lies to himself and the audience, even when he is reenacting fake events from his past, such as when Joanne asks how old he is in a false memory. “Sixteen,” he replies, having just told Joseph a few minutes ago that he is fifteen. When describing another event from his false past with the Elliots, Astrakhan hints at the narrative process that he uses to rewrite both his own history and that of the Elliots: “not a day passes that I don’t bring it back to mind, with, somehow, each time, some new detail emerging, until now it seems even clearer than it was back then. Funny, how memory works.”

The idea of real versus fictionalized memories is familiar territory for Kopit. Says Lahr, “Y2K... is another of Kopit’s brilliant speculations informed by fact, an unnerving hall of mirrors that adds a new perspective to his obsession with memory and identity.” Astrakhan takes his cue from a Flaubert quote that Joseph likes to quote to his writing class: “Everything you invent is true.” This is certainly the case with Astrakhan’s new brand of digital fiction, although it needs a kernel of truth upon which to support the digital narrative. In the case of the Elliots, this seed of truth is never disclosed to the audience. Although Joseph reveals one secret to Joanne, the fact that he and his ex-wife aborted their child during its last trimester when she was undergoing chemotherapy, this is not the other secret to which both he and Astrakhan refer. One suspects that the secret is most likely some dabbling in pornography since this is the major crime that Astrakhan pins on Joseph in the hacker’s digital story. Says Joseph to Joanne: “Speaking for myself, there are things he has found—about me—and which he’s tucked in with all of the really dreadful ’invented’ stuff—which is going to come out.” Joseph suggests that Joanne has dark secrets as well, especially after seeing lurid photos of her with other men, some of which don’t look fake. Whether Joanne is telling the truth to Joseph doesn’t matter. In the digital age, the hacker’s reality is the only one that anybody else will believe. “Astrakhan has the power to re-create the virtual universe at will in his own demented image,” says Lahr.

So what is Astrakhan’s image? What is the idea that he develops so carefully when he revises the Elliots’ lives and his own memories? He wishes to be a part of the Elliots’ family. And by manipulating their lives and scripting new histories for them, Astrakhan writes himself into their lives for good. Astrakhan tells the audience that Joseph was “his way in,” then corrects himself: “No, let’s be honest: to me he is far more than that. In fact, always has been. I just hadn’t discovered it yet.” Astrakhan’s “discovery,” is the aborted baby, and through the hacker’s manipulation of hospital records, he brings the baby back to life and becomes that baby. Astrakhan foreshadows this turn of events at several points throughout the play, especially when he refers to Joseph as a kind of father figure. “If only someone like you had entered my life earlier, my life would be entirely different now,” Astrakhan tells Joseph in a false memory.

In another false memory of his first visit to the Elliots’ apartment, Astrakhan tells Joseph: “When I

publish my first novel, I tell you this is where I’m gonna live.” Astrakhan goes on to clarify that he didn’t mean live with “you and your wife... nice as that might be!” Astrakhan does in fact publish his novel, at least in the digital sense, by creating the new life stories of the Elliots. And in the end, he does end up living with the Elliots, or at least the audience suspects that he will, based on the last few lines of the play:

“The villain of Mr. Kopit’s slender play is, in fact, quite a twisted piece of humanity,” says Peter Marks in his New York Times review, and by the end of the play, the audience agrees. Joseph could try to fight the hacker by proving his innocence, but the tools at the hacker’s disposal are too massive. Astrakhan has created such a large, intricate, digital history that it is almost impossible to disprove. Furthermore, to mount such a massive campaign would require funds that Joseph and Joanne no longer have because Astrakhan has made their bank accounts unattainable, as he himself is unattainable. As Joseph explains to Joanne: “Thompson says it’s almost impossible to know where he actually is, his messages are all time-delayed and routed in a Byzantine way Thompson claims is like a work of art.” For the Elliots, the unfortunate, unwilling characters in a hacker’s digital story, reality is whatever their new puppetmaster says it is.

Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on Y2K, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Semansky is an instructor of English literature and composition and writes regularly for literary

A 1999 playbill cast list of Y2K, performed at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York City

magazines and journals. In this essay, he considers the idea of representation in Kopit’s play.

On the surface, Kopit’s play, Y2K, is a cautionary tale about computer technology taking over peoples’ lives. In positioning technology as the enemy, Kopit raises questions about the representative power of words and images, suggesting that they hold the key to human identity.

In his preface, Kopit writes that he was inspired to write the play after being outraged by Special Investigator Kenneth Starr’s intrusion into the private life of Monica Lewinsky during his investigation of her relationship with former president Bill Clinton. Like the Clinton-Lewinsky story, Kopit’s play releases information incrementally, by different players at key points, essentially reshaping what the audience (the audience for the Clinton-Lewinsky story being the media-consuming public) believes to be the truth. Both stories change the audience perception of the central characters by throwing private actions into public light. Y2K, however, suggests that what happens to Joseph Elliot and his wife, Joanne, can happen to anyone.

In foregrounding the power of technology to reconstitute human identity, Kopit begs certain questions about what makes people who they are. Assumptions about human identity that have guided thinking in the industrialized world include the notion that identity is universal and is based on features such as character and personality, which are intrinsic to a person. In contrast, Kopit’s play emphasizes the notion that identity rests primarily upon the idea of narrative, rather than anything intrinsic or essential. That is, the story of a person’s life, in fact, is that person’s life. Kopit underscores this idea by manipulating readers’ expectations of the truth, so that characters such as Joseph and Joanne, who once seemed to be certain types of people, turn out (possibly) to be other types entirely. By putting stories inside stories inside stories, Kopit blurs the distinction between reality and fiction, creating a hall of mirrors in which characters can no longer recognize characters and readers must construct their own theories for what happened and why. There is no single demonstrable truth against standing behind the many versions of events.

The play opens with punk hacker Costa Astrakhan bragging about his power and his ubiquity. Telling the audience he is everywhere, “on the outskirts of your mind, in the ether, in the darkness,” Astrakhan portrays himself as an arrogant and unreliable narrator. Astrakhan appears both as a realistic character in the play, interacting with Joanne and Joseph during a dinner at their apartment, and as a demonic presence, hovering over and commenting on the play’s action. In the latter role, he is symbolic of technology’s pervasive influence in peoples’ lives. Astrakhan’s speeches about his power, his hacking history, and his relationship with Joanne provide the explanation for much of what happens to Joanne and Joseph. In this way, the play is didactic, meaning that its purpose is to teach the audience something. What it teaches, however, is not so clear. Ostensibly, the play is about the evils of computer technology; but it is also about trust, marital and generational, and the relationship between private and public realities.

Without Astrakhan’s speeches, the play would be more of a mystery. By using Astrakhan as a symbolic character, Kopit introduces nonrealistic elements in the play. Nonrealistic plays differ from realistic plays in that they often distort character and time and use symbolic as opposed to realistic settings. Samuel Beckett’s plays, for example, are nonrealistic plays, as they usually ignore both clock time and historical time and have absurd settings, Page 353  |  Top of Articlesuch as cartoon-like characters inhabiting trashcans. Other nonrealistic playwrights include Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, and David J. LeMaster. By combining realistic elements such as believable settings and action with nonrealistic elements, Kopit further reinforces the idea that reality itself is an unstable phenomenon over which people often have little control.

Take the character of Joanne, for example. Kopit masterfully pits readers’ knowledge of her, which they gain through seeing her interact with her husband, against Astrakhan’s story of her life, which he puts together by hacking into computer systems, including her own and her husband’s. At first, she appears to be a loving, if somewhat distracted, wife to Joseph, effervescent and with a dry sense of humor. The audience finds out through the couple’s interaction that Joanne is fending off the advances of her ex-husband, Francis Summerhays, a wealthy and obsessive venture capitalist, whom Joseph despises. Astrakhan’s representation of her mixes what appears to be fact—details of her birth, education, etc.—with a story of how they came to be lovers. However, even though readers have every reason to doubt Astrakhan’s version of Joanne’s life and especially of their “affair”—after all, he is a proven liar, plagiarist, drug abuser, and self-confessed hacker—they have no credible alternative to what really happened. Joanne’s credibility has already been compromised. Joseph distrusts her, partly because of his own jealousy of Francis and partly because she was reluctant to provide complete information about her encounter with Francis. In addition, throughout most of the play, the characters drink heavily, causing the audience to question the truthfulness and motivation of their words.

As the audience re-evaluates the truthfulness of the various characters’ versions of events in light of new information, they also begin to question the characters’ motivation. This resembles the way in which the Clinton-Lewinsky affair unfolded and, indeed, the way in which many such situations unfold, where a secret is gradually brought to light by others not initially involved. In some ways, the play resembles a courtroom drama with evidence offered, stories presented and denied, intent and motivation probed, and a jury voting to believe one side’s version of events versus another side’s.

One of the primary theories that viewers and readers of Y2K must consider is the possibility that the entire play is a construct of Astrakhan’s mind. His words frame the action, and his god-like presence

during the course of events suggests that he controls what gets said and done. Although Astrakhan has claimed that he initially became interested in Joseph because he wanted to sleep with a girl in Joseph’s writing class, readers are later told that his “true” motivation is to reunite with the Elliots, whom he believes are his biological parents. But even this motivation for ruining their lives is questionable, given Astrakhan’s previous explanations.

If readers consider the play as the machinations of Astrakhan’s mind, complete with the invention of characters, self-referentiality, and stories inside stories, they must ask themselves what larger symbolic meaning this hacker fantasy holds. One explanation is that Astrakhan’s story represents the vengeance of a younger generation upon an older one. As someone barely out of his teens (or so he says at the beginning of the play), Astrakhan stands in for what marketing demographers sometime refer to as Generation Y, those born between 1979 and 1994. The children of baby boomers, they are also sometimes referred to as Echo Boomers, or the Millennium Generation. Even more so than Generation X, which preceded them, Generation Y has something to prove. Often raised by parents who espouse the idealistic values of the 1960s, but with all the material privilege that the bull market of the 1980s and 1990s have given them, Generation Y’ers are the literal embodiment of deeply rooted contradictions.

Carving out their own identities, then, means grappling with the identity of their parents. Astrakhan, then, as hacker and playwright, “solves” this problem by first creating his parents, the Elliots, then destroying them, and then, in the play’s final image, holding himself out as their possible salvation. As a Generation Y son of boomers, he creates the family he never had, and on his own terms. The fact that it is a virtual family is apropos for a Page 354  |  Top of Articlegeneration raised on the (for Kopit, ironic) promise of computer technology to improve the quality of human life.

Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on Y2K, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

In the following interview, based on e-mail exchanges, Arthur Kopit discusses the ideas behind, research for, and technological context of his play Y2K.

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Source: Katie Hafner and Arthur Kopit, “Going Online and Finding a Window on the Times,” in the New York Times, December 5, 1999, p. 7, section 2.

Hafner, Katie and Arthur Kopit, “Going Online and Finding a Window on the Times,” in the New York Times, December 5, 1999, p. 7 section 2.

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Isherwood, Charles, Review of Y2K, in Variety, December 13, 1999.

Jenkins, Jeffrey Eric, “Humana Fest Puts Its Stamp on a Fresh Crop of Plays,” in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 25, 1999.

Kohn, Martin F., “Next Stop: Detroit,” in the Detroit Free Press, April 4, 1999.

Lahr, John, “Open Secrets,” in the New Yorker, Vol. 75, No. 39, December 20, 1999, pp. 100–101.

Marks, Peter, “He’s Mad, He’s Bad and He’s Got Their Passwords,” in the New York Times, December 8, 1999, p. 7.

McNulty, Charles, “On the Verge,” in the Village Voice, March 31–April6, 1999.

Regan, Keith, “Is Internet Privacy an Oxymoron,” in E-Commerce Times (http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/9318.html ), April 27, 2001.

Simon, John, “Mystery Science Theatre 2000,” in New York Magazine, December 20, 1999.

Sommer, Elyse, “A CurtainUp Review: Y2K,” in CurtainUp, July 27, 2000.

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Berlant, Lauren, and Lisa Duggan, eds., Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the Public Interest (Sexual Cultures), New York University Press, 2001.

Eatwell, Roger, Fascism: A History, Allen Lane, 1996.

McLean, Deckle, Privacy and Its Invasion, Praeger, 1995.

Peterson, Chris, I Love the Internet, but I Want My Privacy, Too!, Prima Publishing, 1998.