Adrienne Kennedy

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Binder, Wolfgang. "A MEWS Interview: Adrienne Kennedy." MELUS 12, No. 3 (Fall 1985): 99-108.

Interview in which Kennedy discusses her artistic career and development.

Blau, Herbert. "The American Dream in American Gothic: The Plays of Sam Shepherd and Adrienne Kennedy." Modern Drama XXVII, No. 4 (December 1989): 520-39.

Discusses the concept of the "American dream" in relation to the plays of Shepherd and Kennedy.

Bryant-Jackson, Paul K., and Overbeck, Lois More, eds. Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990, 254 p.

Collection of critical essays.

Cohn, Ruby. "Black on Black: Baraka, Bullins, Kennedy." In her New American Dramatists: 1960-1980, pp. 94-115. New York: Grove Press, 1982.

Brief survey of Kennedy's work.

Curb, Rosemary K. "Re/cognition, Re/presentation, Re/creation in Woman-Conscious Drama: The Seer, the Seen, the Scene, the Obscene." Theatre Journal 37, No. 3 (October 1985): 302-16.

Interprets Funnyhouse of a Negro as a feminist drama, contending that in the play "a pivotal female character speaks in an intensely private voice of the anguish and paralysis she experiences as her identity is broken into stereotyped roles or alter egos."

Fletcher, Winona L. "Who Put the 'Tragic Mulatto' in the Tragic Mulatto?" In Women in American Theatre: Revised and Expanded Edition, edited by Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins, pp. 262-68. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987.

Contends that Kennedy "turns from realism to a surrealist world that can display the tortures and nightmares of her female character—a tragic mulatto searching for an identity that is trapped in conventions and torn by the paradoxes of living in a no man's (nor women's) land."

Kintz, Linda. 'The Sanitized Spectacle: What's Birth Got to Do with It? Adrienne Kennedy's A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White." Theatre Journal 44, No. 1 (March 1992): 67-86.

Analyzes Kennedy's play from a feminist perspective, focusing on the concept of birth.

Murray, Timothy. "Facing the Camera's Eye: Black and White Terrain in Women's Drama." In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., pp. 155-75. New York: Meridian, 1990.

Includes a brief thematic and stylistic analysis of Kennedy's An Evening with Dead Essex.

Oliver, Edith. Review of Funnyhouse of a Negro, by Adrienne Kennedy. The New Yorker XXXIX, No. 49 (25 January 1964): 76, 78.

Laudatory review of the New York production.

Sollors, Werner. "Owls and Rats in the American Funnyhouse: Adrienne Kennedy's Drama." American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 63, No. 3 (September 1991): 507-32.

Overview of Kennedy's work. Sollors states: "It is hoped that the following reading of seven of Kennedy's major plays against the background of her autobiography may suggest the unpredictability and open-endedness of literary influences and stimulate further interest in her work."

Tener, Robert L. "Theatre of Identity: Adrienne Kennedy's Portrait of the Black Woman." Studies in Black Literature 6, No. 2 (Summer 1975): 1-5.

Explores the imagery in The Owl Answers, maintaining that Kennedy uses "images of historical and religious figures and those of birds and the fig tree to make a bitter and satirical comment on the American black female trapped by the conflict of cultures and sexual roles in twentieth-century America."

Additional coverage of Kennedy's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale Research: Black Literature Criticism, Vol. 2; Black Writers; Contemporary Authors, Vol. 103; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 26; Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Vol. 20;Contemporary Authors Bibliographical Series, Vol. 3; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 66; and Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 38.

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Overviews And General Studies