Born in New York City, Arthur Kopit grew up in Lawrence, Long Island, where his father worked as a jeweler. Upon his graduation from high school in 1955, Kopit entered Harvard University on scholarship. Despite a major in engineering, the youthful undergraduate proved his versatility in the arts. During his last three years at the university, he won two playwriting contests, saw seven of his plays produced at Harvard, and directed six of them himself. His first one-act drama, The Questioning of Nick, written during the spring of 1957 for the Dunster House Drama Workshop, took Kopit only three or four days to write. Drawing from his personal experience as a high-school basketball player, Kopit wrote of a teenage athlete's rebellious attitudes, an arrogant pose splintered by interrogation experts at police headquarters. The Questioning of Nick focuses on Nick, the product of a tough, immigrant environment, who has never had...