Home > Funnyhouse of a Negro Summary & Study Guide > Essays and Criticism > For the Characters Are Myself’: Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro

Funnyhouse of a Negro | For the Characters Are Myself’: Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro

In the following essay, Brown sees the play as a
world in which ‘‘Blackness, femaleness, and education
are equally important isolating factors.’’

For the days are past when there are places and characters with connections with themes as in the stories you pick up on the shelves of public libraries. . . . There is no theme. No statements. . . . For the statement is the characters and the characters are myself.

These words spoken by Sarah, the young Negro student, in Adrienne Kennedy’s play, Funnyhouse of a Negro, apply both to Sarah’s own troubled personal world and to the felicitous form of the play itself. An ornate dramatic image, reflecting kinship with and absorption of the work of...

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