The Life of the Work: A Preliminary Sketch
[Below, Overbeck offers an overview of Kennedy's career.]
There are no consolidated archives of Adrienne Kennedy's manuscripts or of the production history of her plays. Many of the plays had their first appearance in workshop productions with brief runs and without critical notice. Experimental theatres seldom had resources to record the development of their productions when funding for their season or even the next play was a priority. When available, programs, reviews, and interviews have been consulted to gain a sense of production values and directorial choices. While these are inadequate resources for a comprehensive stage history, the resulting overview will suggest directions for further research.
Kennedy indicates that both Funnyhouse of A Negro and The Owl Answers were completed manuscripts when she applied to Edward Albee's Circle in the Square workshop, and that the script of Funnyhouse produced in the workshop was the original. In an interview [in Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy], performer Billie Allen comments on her sense of Kennedy's writing as "finished": "It is all there, and it is all done." With Kennedy, as with any writer, there are manuscripts that were written and abandoned or not produced, or produced in workshop but not published (e.g., Diary of Lights, Boats), or performed in workshop and then altered by others (e.g., The Lennon Play: or In His Own Write). Other works were published initially in a journal or anthology but not republished in the author's collected plays (e.g., A Beast Story, An Evening with Dead Essex).
Even if manuscripts and variants of Kennedy's plays were available for study, a script alone would not tell us the nature of the production, because dramaturgical improvisation brings the nuances and the suggestive possibility of images and nonlinear structures to life in performance. Music, though seldom designated in the script, is often integral to production values (Sun, She Talks to Beethoven, the adaptation Solo Voyages), and musical forms even generate theatrical shape. Visual effects are visceral evocations of subliminal/emotional realities (the massive sculpture of Queen Victoria in Funnyhouse of a Negro in the Théâtre Odéon production, the rotating stage of The Owl Answers in the 1969 production at the Public Theater, the simultaneous layers of reality expressed by multiple levels of staging in The Owl Answers, the projections of An Evening with Dead Essex, the dominant color in the set of Orestes and Electro).
It is clear from interviews with directors and actors that Kennedy's plays are open to a directorial hand, as indicated by Michael Kahn's comment that he did not stage the jungle scene in Funnyhouse, though he would today, and in Gerald Freeman's note that Kennedy's plays require "new techniques and new answers." In some cases the final form of the play varies considerably from the original. Differing slightly in title (A Beast Story), the published version of A Beast's Story is not the same as the one indicated by the prompt books and acting scripts when it was performed as part of Cities in Bezique at the Public Theater (1969); in production the number of beasts multiplied, and the beasts' costumes indicated by the text were dropped in favor of rehearsal clothes. There are also changes from script to performance that reflect variations in the playing space, conceptualization of a character, or casting; there were differences between the original production of An Evening with Dead Essex in the small rehearsal space of the American Place Theatre and the larger stage at Yale, and differences between the original production of Funnyhouse of a Negro and that directed by David Wheeler at the Theater Company, Boston. Complete records of these productions and their variations would be desirable, because they would offer interpretive illuminations of the plays … .
Kennedy's early writing is largely unpublished. Pale Blue Flowers (1955), a one-act play modeled on Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, has not been published or performed. In an interview with Kathleen Betsko [in Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (1987)], Kennedy describes working on it for two years: "I had written the play in a course at the New School taught by Mildred Kunner," who entered it in a play contest in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; it didn't win. She then sent it to Williams's agent, Audrey Wood, "who wrote me a long letter which said she couldn't take me as a client, but that she thought I was very talented. That was a great encouragement to me." Kennedy's first published writing, "Because of the King of France," appeared under the name Adrienne Cornell in Black Orpheus: A Journal of African and A fro-American Literature [1963]. The short story about the vicissitudes of Sidney Carter as viewed by a middle-class young woman, the writer, prefigures the themes and narrative shifts of the plays that follow it: racial exclusion and punishment for loving across racial barriers, artistic gifts expressed within the Eurocentric traditions, self-hatred and deformity, class discrimination, and imaginary conversations with historical figures.
In Deadly Triplets, Kennedy describes submitting Funny-house of a Negro to Edward Albee's workshop at the Circle in the Square in application to the workshop; Michael Kahn called her later to say "Edward Albee liked your play very much[;] you have been selected to be in the workshop." Although Kennedy indicates mat the play done in the workshop production was the original version, she felt that her play was too revealing and, at one point, had decided to drop out of the class. She reports Albee's response: "A playwright is someone who lets his guts out on the stage and mat's what you've done in this play …. It's your decision." The play was done first at the Circle in the Square and then again at the Actor's Studio (1964), directed by Michael Kahn, with Diana Sands, Fran Burnett, Lynne Hamilton, Yaphet Kotto, and Andre Gregory in the cast.
Kennedy says that she wrote Funnyhouse of a Negro in 1960, "when I was exactly twenty-nine," and that the play reflected fourteen months spent in Europe, Ghana, and Nigeria:
My writing became sharper, more focused and powerful, and less imitative. It was a tremendous turning point …. I would say that almost every image in Funnyhouse took form while I was in West Africa where I became aware of masks.… I discovered a strength in being a black person and a connection to West Africa.
Funnyhouse of a Negro opened at the East End Theatre on January 14, 1964, produced by Theatre 1964 (Richard Barr, Clinton Wilder, and Edward Albee), with performances twice a night (closing February 9, 1964). The Play was directed by Michael Kahn; settings and lighting were by William Ritman and costumes were by Willa Kim. The role of Sarah was played by Billie Allen; other actors were Cynthia Belgrave, Ellen Holly, Gus Williams, Norman Bush, Ruth Volner, Leonard Frey, and Leslie Rivers. In describing the play as "the hallucinated horrors that torment the last hours of a Negro girl," Howard Taubman acknowledged the power of the play [in the New York Times, 15 January 1964], saying mat Kennedy "digs unsparingly into Sarah's aching psyche." He also describes the sideshow figures of Funnyhouse, positioned on either side of the stage, and the presence of a statue of Queen Victoria, and elaborates: "Her other companions [the Duchess of Hapsburg, Queen Victoria, Jesus, and Patrice Lumumba] are the impalpable figments of her imagination … that become corporeal on the stage. She speaks the brief litany of her fears and hatred and despair and her ghosts often repeat and mock her."
[In the New Yorker, 25 January 1964] Edith Oliver sketches me elegance of "elaborate period costumes of white" with "white or gray masklike makeups" worn by the figures of Victoria, Hapsburg, and Jesus; she contrasts the image of Lumumba, black and dressed "in tatters"; she notes mat the Funnyhouse man and woman are in "clown makeups" and move with "marionette gestures." Although Sarah's monologue supplies the play's narrative, Oliver notes that "she is in no shape to give it" and that Sarah's "obsession with hair" parallels the "obsession with grief and guilt over her treatment of her father, whom she has driven away because of his blackness." She comments that Kahn's expressionist attempt to "reproduce the girl's madness and anguish … seems appropriate" and mat Funnyhouse is a "strong and original" first play.
Although George Oppenheimer [Newsday, 15 January 1964] saw the play as bad theater of the absurd and a dismal "charade," a "non-play" with a "non-plot," Taubman concluded, "If nothing much happens according to conventional theatrical tenets, a relatively unknown territory is explored and exposed." Writing for Nation [10 February 1964], Harold Clurman underscores the uniqueness of Kennedy's voice:
The play … embraces far more than plays of similar theme when they are couched in terms of pathetic appeals for "tolerance" and fair play. The torment of the colored girl in Funny House [sic] of a Negro parallels that of all people who suffer the pathology of minorities. Their number extends far beyond the boundaries of race.
Funnyhouse of a Negro was awarded an Obie for "most distinguished play" in May 1964. The play was produced by the Theater Company of Boston beginning March 11, 1965. Directed by David Wheeler, mis production conceptualized Sarah, played by Barbara Ann Teer, as a powerful female; Gustav Johnson enacted the role of Lumumba, with settings by Robert Allen and lighting by Neville Powers. Wheeler's production emphasized the mythic element of the play, building to "an unbearable crescendo"; strips of black muslin were hung at angles, so that props and figures seemed to emerge from the nightmare. [In the Boston Globe, 12 March 1965] Kevin Kelly said that Wheeler "captured the focal fear at the heart of the play and exposed it with an unfaltering sense of drama."
Funnyhouse was presented as Drôle de baraque on a double bill with Sam Shepard's Chicago at me Petit Odéon in Paris under the direction of Jean-Marie Serreau on March 8, 1968. Adapted by Augy Hayter, me play featured Toto Bissainthe, a Haitian, as Sarah and Douta Seck as Lumumba. "The play expresses [Sarah's] dreams, her fantasies, her nightmares brought on by the horror of her estranged condition in a white world" [C. G., "Jeunes Américains," Les nouvelles literraires, 7 March 1968]. Central to the production was a huge white bust of Queen Victoria. [In Le Monde, 19 March 1968] B. Poirot-Delpech compares Kennedy's work to Genet's The Blacks and O'Neill's Emperor Jones. [In Le Figaro, 11 March 1968] Jean-Jacques Gautier emphasized the production's grating music, which underlines the "spasmodic monologue" in which Sarah "kills her father. It is true. It is not true." He finds the production ambiguous—"it is nearly impossible to know who is who and who does what." On the other hand, the review in Combat [19 March 1968] is very appreciative: "Showing a young black [woman] imprisoned in the complexes and conditioning that American society has created in her," Kennedy's theatre has "fantastic life (and so real at the same time)"; it is "theatre that has a power to attack that is, finally, as sure as that of LeRoi Jones." Supported by jazz rhythms and physical movement, "the black American problem is evoked in an excruciating way." The review in the Journal de Genève [6 April 1968] said of the production, "In a dance macabre rhythm and full of a poignant poetry, the spectacle … astonishes with its content and its form, with the ensemble as with the least detail, with its rhythm where the music plays in counterpoint to the role of the broken and cruel world in which we live." And Jacques Lemarchand wrote [in Figro Litérraire, 25 March 1968], "Adrienne Kennedy defines an aspect of the American problem with great simplicity in reverie, without proposing solution, without preaching sufferance or reconciliation."
Funnyhouse of a Negro was presented by the English Stage Society at the Royal Court on Sunday, April 28, 1968, with A Lesson in Dead Language; there it was directed by Rob Knights with Sheila Wilkinson as Sarah. [In the Times, London, 29 April 1968] Michael Billington wrote, "Unfortunately the phantasmagoric nature of the action … only serves to confuse …. Miss Kennedy's language has a controlled, deliberate rhythm to it but even this suffers from the belief that anything said three times is poetry." Kennedy wrote a filmscript of Funnyhouse of a Negro with Pablo Feraro in 1971; it was not produced.
Kennedy had written The Owl Answers by the time she submitted Funnyhouse of a Negro to the Edward Albee playwriting workshop. The original production by Lucille Lortel was at the White Barn Theater, Westport, Connecticut, on August 29, 1965, as a benefit for the Free Southern Theater; it was also performed at the Theatre de Lys in New York as part of the ANTA Matinee Theater Series on December 14, 1965. Directed by Michael Kahn, the production starred Ellen Holly as "She who is Clara." Like a Funnyhouse of a Negro, The Owl Answers "takes place on different levels of consciousness," said Kahn. "She has several father figures … and several mothers, … and historical figures … who appear as passengers on the subway and as jailors." Kennedy points to personal experience as embedded in the play. Living in Ghana, she would hear owls in the trees, and particularly at night "the owls sounded as if they were in the very center of the room"; memory of the owl sounds mingle with fear, as Kennedy recounts listening to them while confined to bed with a difficult pregnancy. "In a few months I would create a character who would turn into an owl."
When produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival (Joseph Papp), Owl Answers was paired with Kennedy's A Beast's Story under the title, Cities in Bezique. Actually, Cities in Bezique was the title of a play that Adrienne Kennedy had written in 1967-68; it had been commissioned by Joseph Papp for the New York Shakespeare Festival, but Papp found it "too chaotic and abstract" and instead used this title for the two one-act plays, Owl Answers and A Beast's Story. As Kennedy indicates in the interview [in Intersecting Boundaries], Joseph Papp said, "Well, I don't really like the play very much. But I'd like to use the title." Gerald Freedman, who directed the program at the Public Theater, describes the original Cities in Bezique in the interview with Paul Bryant-Jackson [in Intersecting Boundaries]:
A lot of it was images … . I thought I could do a wonderful piece of it in a darkened room with a slot where one person could look through, and I could change images…. [However] it didn't become practical for the Public Theater to do it. It would have been a wonderful performance piece …. Bezique is a card game … of chance and so her text actually had pictures in it. And cards turned over.… I would have loved to do it, but I don't know a theatre company that could afford to do it.
The production of The Owl Answers and A Beast's Story as Cities in Bezique ran for sixtyseven performances at the Public Theater, January 4 to March 2, 1969. Gerald Freedman directed, with settings by Ming Cho Lee, costumes by Theoni V. Aldredge, lighting by Martin Aronstein, and incidental music by John Morris. "She who is Clara Passmore who is the Virgin Mary who is the Bastard who is the Owl" was played by Joan Harris; Cynthia Belgrave played the mothers); Moses Gunn, the father(s); Henry Baker, the white bird; and Paul Benjamin, the Negro Man in The Owl Answers.
Reviewers noted the similarities to Funnyhouse: both plays explored a "lightskinned Negro woman's mental anguish and search for a sense of identity" [Variety, 29 January 1969]. Although beginning in realism, The Owl Answers introduced other dimensions of time and space. [In the Daily News, 13 January 1969] Lee Silver wrote of Clara as "a nice student in tweed skirt and sweater, calmly reading through the screeching noises of the underground," and Richard P. Cooke describes transmutation into the surreal: "Through the subway aisles parade creatures of [Clara's] imagination—Shakespeare, Chaucer, William the Conqueror, Anne Boleyn, along with some Negroes in modern dress. White people are represented by masks" [Wall Street Journal, 14 January 1969]. As Richard Watts observed [in the New York Post, 13 January 1969] "Past and present merge, characters shift from being one person to another, and time is telescoped."
Comparing Kennedy's double bill to "the surrealist school of films of the 30's," George Oppenheimer [Daily Item (Port Chester, N.Y.) 13 January 1969] found "kinship in manner and mood," if not symbolic clarity, with Cocteau. [In New York, 3 February 1969] John Simon describes the variety of settings: the Tower of London, St. Paul's Cathedral [Chapel], and a Harlem hotel room, noting mat place and time shift continually and characters double; he describes "a large white papier-mâché bird, which flaps wings at arbitrary intervals," hovering above the stage and "a large black man clad in white feathers who occasionally speaks." Labeling Cities in Bezique as a "happening," Steve Tennen wrote:
[Freedman] has molded the plays into nightmarish, almost ritualistic forms. Through precisioned movement of his cast, their vocal quality and facial expressions, he has removed them from the human element and left only the shadow of the supernatural.
Theoni Aldredge's costumes & masks … add to this strange dimension. Ming Cho Lee's set is dark and forbidding, and, combined with John Morris' music and sound, it becomes rattingly eerie [Show Business, 25 January 1969].
In what he calls "the female face of tragedy," J. Lance Ermatinger says [in Off-Off, April 1969] that Kennedy "aims a poet's eye along a surgeon's scalpel, and she penetrates layer after layer of the white/black protagonist … . The birds represent both the Holy Spirit of Christianity and the coq blanc of Voodoo that traces its flight back from Harlem to Haiti to Dahomey in West Africa …. [Cities in Bezique] immolates me white consciousness in a vortex of the Black Context." Ermatinger also offers comment on audience response to the plays at the Public Theater:
The witnesses are completely involved, although there is no physical invasion of the audience. Neither black nor white can deny the power of Adrienne Kennedy's fierce poetry …. Yet both react with confused anger.
What provokes this anger? I think it is the absence of the doctrinaire in Bezique. The White Liberals are offered none of the clichés that bring cold comfort to our day of confrontation. The Black Militants, on the other hand, hear no sizzling slogans. All witness only the story of one human being in a context as richly personal as it is beautifully black.
A Beast's Story (1965) was commissioned by Herbert Blau and Jules Irving for Lincoln Center but was not produced until its performance as a part of Cities in Bezique, with Amanda Ambrose as the Woman, Moses Gunn as the Man Beast, and Robbie McCauley, Theta Tucker, and Camilie Yarbrough as the Girl Beasts. The published text indicates a single Girl Beast, whereas the production at the Public Theater had three.
Understood by Clive Barnes as a "word image," the play evokes sexual fear and repression as it enacts the rape of a young girl by a man whom she "identifies with her father," a subsequent stillbirth, and "the murder of the young man with an ax" [New York Times, 13 January 1969]. Cooke writes, "[The] young woman's personality is projected by three other women"; they are "painting the colors of the sun, to represent the feelings experienced on the day [the] girl murders the man who violated her."
"Roles seem to be interchangeable between girl beasts, while woman, human woman beast, man beast and other beasts enact an allegory … [with] a haunting quality," wrote George Oppenheimer. Walter Kerr described his impressions:
All roles blur, blend, divide and recombine while two doves—one white, one black beneath the white—flutter moldy wings overhead and the heavens light up with fingerpainted child's pictures of houses, robins, blood-stains, and ebony suns. Sounds, sights, gestures recur as in a dream that won't move forward … back [New York Times, 19 January 1969].
[In Intersecting Boundaries] Gerald Freedman discusses the evolution of the production he directed, with particular reference to the Beast figures. [In a 1969 radio review] David Marash indicated that the two plays were "worlds apart," citing The Owl Answers as "the best play off-… or for that matter on Broadway this year" but A Beast's Story as "beastly, boring and banal." [In Women's Wear Daily, 13 January 1969] Martin Gottfried called the plays "unjustified indulgence," but Richard Watts said, "If what [Kennedy] is saying is at times difficult to decipher, … she is giving us important and moving insights into the minds and emotions of deeply tormented people." Although Walter Kerr felt that the spectator was left outside of the plays and that in them "nothing is drawn to a center, distilled, condensed to leave a residue," there was "a spare, unsentimental intensity about the work that promises to drive a dagger home some day." On the other hand, despite their expressionism, Edith Oliver noted [in the New Yorker, 25 January 1969] that the plays "command and hold one's unflagging attention." Cities in Bezique was published in 1969; only The Owl Answers was republished in Adrienne Kennedy: In One Act.
A Rat's Mass, written in 1963, was directed by David Wheeler of the Theater Company of Boston (opening April 12, 1966) and was named one of the best plays of the Boston season. The cast included Paul Benedict, Edward Finnegan, Warren Finnerty, Josephine Lane, James Spruill, Nadine Turner, and Blythe Danner. The play was produced by F. Carlton and Ann Colcord at the San Saba Theatre in Rome (opening June 21, 1966) with Ben B. Ardery, Jr., directing it on a program with Ardery's Beside the Pool and Sam Shepard's Icarus. Joan Sutherland and Nat Bush played Sister and Brother Rat, with Betty Jane Hobbs as Rosemary. [In Rome Daily American, 26-27 June 1966] Ann Colcord described the theme and action of the play: "They gnaw and nibble surreptitiously at the very standards of life that Americans use to hold themselves together, individually and as a group." Brother and Sister Rat are unable to expiate their guilt for a childhood incest inspired by playmate Rosemary, a Catholic girl dressed for her first communion, who also refuses to pardon them; the siblings are caught in and alienated by the white/Christian ethos. [In "A Growth of Images," Drama Review 21 (December 1977)] Kennedy has said that the images of A Rat's Mass were based on a dream she had while traveling by train from Paris to Rome: "I had this dream in which I was being pursued by red, bloodied rats. It was [a] very powerful dream, and when I woke up the train had stopped in the Alps. It was at night.… I was just haunted by that image for years, about being pursued by these big, red rats."
Italian response to the play was enthusiastic. L'Unità's reviewer discussed the "archetypal symbolism" that insists on a "historic reality, almost an existential reality": rather man being characteristics of individuals, the segregation and bestial behavior of the characters are the image of a "degrading collective condition." In Specchio [3 July 1966] A Rat's Mass was described as a "kind of black spiritual," with Kennedy's voice both "lyrical and obsessive"; "instead of the liberation of catharsis … we have a regression to the terrible condition of rats." The conviction of the production impressed the reviewer for Il Messaggero [23 June 1966]: "Even to people who do not understand the English text, the play speaks with the suggestion of a ballet." A Rat's Mass played in the repertory of the New American Theater at the Cultural Union in Turin from October 28, 1966.
It was produced in New York by La Mama E.T.C. (August 17, 1969), directed by Seth Allen, with music by Lamar Alford; Mary Alice played Sister Rat; Robert Robinson, Brother Rat; and Marilyn Roberts, Rosemary. Allen staged the play as a "parody mass" and "illuminate[d] its shadows and heighten[ed] its echoes." [Clive] Barnes continued, "[Kennedy's] plays read like nonsense and yet, when acted, their phrases float accusingly in the mind.… Of all our black writers, Miss Kennedy is most concerned with white, with white relationship, with white blood. She minks black, but she remembers white" [New York Times, 1 November 1969]. La Mama took A Rat's Mass to London's Royal Court Theatre; mere it was directed by Ching Yeh, with Barbara Montgomery as Sister Rat, Lamar Alford as Brother Rat, and Patricia Gaul as Rosemary. [In the Times, London, 27 May 1970] Irving Wardle observes that Kennedy, unlike most black American playwrights, is an experimentalist, and he sees A Rat's Mass as a lurid poetic ritual; Rosemary turns into a Medusa head as Brother and Sister Rat become rodents "who infest the beams of the house."
As Kennedy mentions [in her interview in Intersecting Boundaries], the La Mama production of A Rat's Mass enjoyed great success, and Ellen Stewart proposed to do the play as an opera. In 1976, A Rat's Mass/Procession in Shout was performed at the La Mama Annex with music by Cecil Taylor, jazz composer and pianist. Taylor used fragments from the original play in dialogue and lyrics and used orchestrated voices as instruments. Played by the Cecil Taylor Unit, "the plangency of the music echoes the doom-filled sentiments of the text," wrote Mel Gussow [in the New York Times, 11 March 1976]. A Rat's Mass was published in New Black Playwrights (1968).
A Lesson in Dead Language (1964) was presented by the English Stage Society at the Royal Court (London) on a double bill with Funnyhouse of a Negro (April 28, 1968). Directed by Rob Knights, the production featured Julia McCarthy as the Teacher and Anne Thompson as me Pupil. [In the Times, London, 29 April 1968] Michael Billington called it a "playlet of startling brevity and obscure intent" and mentions engaging music by Ginger Johnson and his African Drummers as part of the program. Gaby Rodgers directed a workshop performance of A Lesson in Dead Language, a production of Theatre Genesis, at St. Mark's Church in New York from April 22 to May 2, 1971. In the interview with Howard Stein [in Intersecting Boundaries], Rodgers details the process of discovery that was involved in developing her production. As is suggested by the first line of the play, "Lesson I bleed," sexual maturation is treated as trauma. Rodgers recollects that Kennedy had a nun in mind in creating the figure of the teacher, depicted as a white dog teaching a class of adolescent girls, all in white dresses with red stains. In Rodgers's production, the setting included the stations of the cross, and movement included actors as religious sculptures. She also used gospel music played by Lamar Alford. A Lesson in Dead Language was published in Collision Course (1968).
In the "Theatre Journal" included in Deadly Triplets, Kennedy explains that her son had the nonsense books of John Lennon, A Spaniard in the Works and In His Own Write, and she often "sat among [his] toys" reading them. Interested in doing a play from them, and encouraged by Gillian Walker at the Circle in the Square, Kennedy began writing The Lennon Play in a borrowed studio atop the Dakota (ironically, where Lennon later was living at the time he was shot) shortly before she left for England on a Rockefeller Grant. In London she was introduced to Victor Spinetti, who had been in the Beatles movies; he became interested in directing the play and helped Kennedy adapt Lennon's books to the stage. Later, after a single performance of the play for an invited audience (1967), it was decided that the play should be done, but without Kennedy. She asked Lennon to intervene ("After working on this play for almost a year I hear they want me out of it"), and he did by calling Kenneth Tynan, literary manager at the National Theatre. It was announced that Victor Spinetti would direct the "emended production" at the National Theatre in June 1968 and that John Lennon was collaborating with Adrienne Kennedy on the play. Martin Esslin's review [in the New York Times, 14 July 1968] notes that the play was "originally devised" by Adrienne Kennedy, but "extensively revised" by Spinetti and Lennon. Under the direction of Victor Spinetti, the play was modified with improvisational work by the cast.
It opened as The Lennon Play: In His Own Write as part of Triple Bill (with Henry Fielding's The Covent Garden Tragedy and a Victorian farce by John Maddison Morton, A Most Unwarrantable Intrusion) at the Old Vic of the National Theatre on June 18, 1968. The central figure of the play is "Me" (played by Ronald Pickup), who, as a member of a family of television addicts, invents his own fantasy world out of vignettes of childhood and popular culture. Irving Wardle's review [in the Times, London, 19 June 1968] describes "a montage of working-class provincial upbringing" (boys' comics, Sherlock Holmes, "a burlesque Halmet, . . . nonsense sermons and launching ceremonies, nightmares, and quarrels"); the production "made elaborate use of side screen and back projections," costume changes, and "spirited" group movement. He found it faithful to the Lennon word games and cartoons, but said, "It leaves you with … a soporific flow of mindless punning." In the New York Times [10 June 1968], Wardle says that Lennon's books consist of "brief pieces directed against every sacred British cow." He adds, "The books are anything but theatrical, but with the aid of an American adapter, Adrienne Kennedy, and the director, Victor Spinetti, they have been assembled into the loose but workable stage form of a boy's struggle between his fantasies and his environment." [In the New York Times, 9 July 1968] Clive Barnes called attention to Lennon's obsession with language, notably "strange sur-realistic malapropisms," and called the production "fast, furious and fun." The Lennon Play was produced in Albany, New York, by the Arena Summer Theatre in August 1969; it was published as The Lennon Play: In His Own Write (1968).
Sun: A Poem for Malcolm X Inspired by His Murder was commissioned by the Royal Court Theatre in 1968 and was produced at the Theatre Upstairs, the Royal Court, in August 1969. It was published in Scripts (1971). In her interview [in Intersecting Boundaries], Kennedy indicates that she had been commissioned by Jerome Robbins to write something for the Theatre Lab and had begun to write about Malcolm but did not finish it; then, when she was commissioned to write a play by the Royal Court, she was "working on some material from drawings of Leonardo da Vinci." Complemented by sound effects/music, improvisational lighting, and rear-screen projections, movement merges with verbal and visual imagery in a tone poem about a man dismembered among the shattered elements of a cosmos; the only remnant is a "tiny black Sun." Wilfred Leach directed Sun: A Poem at La Mama E.T.C. (Cafe La Mama) January 11 to 13, 1974; Andre Mtumi played "The Man." The production was "conceived by The Present Elements"; visuals were done by Karma Stanley, audio by Ancel O'Garro, and lighting by Charles Embry. [In Black Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s: A Historical-Critical Analysis of the Movement, 1985] Lance Williams calls Sun a choreo-poem, precursor to Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, because it "combines poetry and body movement to create dramatic intensity"; he particularly notes the improvisational "Free Jazz" accompaniment by the Ornett Coleman Double Quartet in the La Mama production. Director Gaby Rodgers indicates [in an unpublished interview] that she had developed a production of Sun "frame by frame, but it was finally too expensive to mount for Off-Off Broadway."
Kennedy's play, Boats, was commissioned for "An Omnibus of Short Works," organized by Gordon Davidson and directed by Ed Parone. It was performed at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles as part of the second "Evening of Plays" on October 11 and 12, 1969. The script of this brief play is not available.
Adrienne Kennedy mentions the way that An Evening with Dead Essex evolved from a sniper incident in New Orleans that ended with the slaying of James Essex. A departure for Kennedy's dramaturgy, the play uses projections of Vietnam news headlines to counterpoint the story of Essex. Its situation is a rehearsal; the director-producer works with black actors to recreate scenes from the life of the dead Essex. Brechtian projections establish media representation of Essex as a presence in the play (the projectionist, who never speaks, is designated as the only white character). Images of religious comfort, such the Twenty-third Psalm, stand in opposition to Essex's story and war headlines from Vietnam, reports of other assassinations (President Kennedy, Malcolm, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Kent State), black revolutionary slogans, a tape of "When I've Done the Best I Can," and Nixon's banalities intended to gloss military aggression in Viet Nam. .
Both at the American Place Theatre (New York), directed by Gaby Rodgers (November 28, 1973), and at the Yale Repertory Company (New Haven, Connecticut), directed by Andre Mtumi (March 1974), the process of producing the play reflected the volatility of racial tensions at that time. In the interview with Howard Stein [in Intersecting Boundaries], Gaby Rodgers elaborates on the improvisations and struggles that took place in rehearsal of this play that is itself a rehearsal—of a life and of a play; its cast included Mary Alice, Bill Cobbs, Sid Morgan, Jr., Andre Mtumi, Fred Seagraves, and Karma Stanley.
When Kennedy was a CBS fellow at the Yale School of Drama (1973-74), An Evening with Dead Essex was produced on a program with Sam Shepard's Geography of a Horse Dreamer by the Yale Repertory Company (March 1974). Robert Brustein describes the rehearsals and performance of the play in Making Scenes: "In her own mind, Adrienne had written not a documentary but an activist piece with revolutionary implications, and the director she selected [Andre Mtumi] wanted to treat Dead Essex as a piece of racial propaganda." On the other hand, Brustein had perceived Essex as a "symbol of violence," and he was concerned that the production conferred martyrdom on Essex as "a victim of a repressive white police state." The script has each character leave the theatre for home at the end of the play; however, in rehearsal for the production, Brustein says, "the play ended with everybody passing a gun from hand to hand, the implication that they were preparing to take up Essex's dedication to violence." Brustein asked that the gun be removed from the play, but admits his ambivalence because any act of censorship was troubling and created an impasse for the production. An Evening with Dead Essex was published in Theater (1978); it was not reprinted in In One Act
Directed by Joseph Chaikin as a work-in-progress in the workshop series of the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Public Theater in New York, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White was performed in November 1976. Robbie McCauley played Clara, the writer, with Avra Pet-rides as Bette Davis, Elin Ruskin as Shelley Winters, and Gloria Foster as the mother. Arthur Sainer, in the Village Voice [29 November 1976], described the play as the vision of a single character, a writer, "whose life is so tied up with the films that … scenes from these films (Now, Voyager, Viva Zapata!, and A Place in the Sun) … become structures within which the events in her life are replayed." Sainer saw the play in the same "confessional" vein as Funnyhouse of a Negro, but reported that knowledge about the character was blocked rather than revealed.
According to Eileen Blumenthal [in her Joseph Chaikin: Exploring the Boundaries of Theater, 1984], Movie Star was the "only new script" that Chaikin had directed that was "not connected to one of his laboratories"; she also indicates that Chaikin worked closely with Kennedy, "condensing, tightening dialogue, and clarifying." He was drawn to her "depiction of direct experience being redigested and reshaped to conform to popular culture models." The play was first published in Wordplays 3 (1984). It was produced at the University of Houston (from February 8, 1985), and directed by Ntozake Shange.
Kennedy was commissioned to write The Lancashire Lad by the Empire State Youth Theater Institute, where it was performed in May 1980. The play is a fictionalized account of the childhood of Charles Chaplin, based on Chaplin's biography. Produced by Patricia B. Snyder, the play includes musical numbers and "a full-blown Palladium review, complete with fan dancer and low comics." [In the New York Times, 21 May 1980] Frank Rich says that Kennedy "tells her central story with such heart-stopping passion that not even a circus could upstage it or blunt it." The boy, here called William Grimby, contends with an alcoholic father, a mentally disturbed mother, and grinding poverty. Although he succeeds as a performer, Kennedy does not "allow her audience to escape her drama's gravest implications." The play was directed by Joseph Balflor, with music by George Harris; John Thomas McGuire III was William Grimby. Rich concludes that "the real star is Miss Kennedy, whose language achieves powerful emotional effects with the sparest of means." The text of the play is not available.
Black Children's Day, a children's play, was commissioned by Brown University while Kennedy was artist-in-residence; it was directed by George Houston Bass and produced by Rites and Reason at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (November 1980).
Orestes and Electro, adaptations of Euripides' plays, were commissioned by the Juilliard School, where they were directed by Michael Kahn as a performance project (November 5 to 9, 1980) and in repertory (April 11 to 14, 1981). With music and vocal sounds by Kirk Nurock, sets and lights by Loren Sherman, choreography by Randolyn Zinn, and costumes by Mariann Verheyen, the cast included Linda Kozlowski as Electra and Val Kilmer as Orestes. [In Theatre Crafts 15 (August-September 1981)] Ronn Smith commented that the plays were "loosely condensed and finely adapted" by Kennedy. Noting the female-dominated chorus and a robust Electra, Robert Massa called it an "Amazon production"—"an interesting approach, since the plays chronicle the re-establishment of the patriarchal order after the Trojan War" [Village Voice, 21 April 1981]. Mythic dimensions, heightened by primitive and feathered costumes combined with movement and color ("performers writhing about the burnt-orange bowl-shaped stage"), created a "visceral production of ancient drama."
Kennedy's Diary of Lights, a musical without songs, was directed by David Willinger at CitiRep, Davis Hall, City College in New York, from June 5 to 14, 1987. The production of this autobiographical play included a jazz continuo by Gib Veconi and abstract dance movements superim-posed on the text; Tracy Hendryx designed the choreography. "The play is concerned with the youthful idealism of a young black [married] couple on the inter-racial Upper West Side of New York City" [an advertisement in Black Masks, May/June 1987]. The text is not published.
Solo Voyages, Joseph Chaikin's adaptation of three monologues from the plays of Adrienne Kennedy (The Owl Answers, A Rat's Mass, and A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White), was performed by Robbie McCauley. Produced by the Interart Theatre in association with the American National Theatre at Kennedy Center, the adaptation was performed in New York (September 11 to October 20, 1985) and Washington (November 25 to December 14, 1985). The production included music composed and performed by Skip LaPlante and Edwina Lee Tyler, set by Jun Maeda, and puppets by Ronnie Asbell. Alisa Solomon's review in the Village Voice [1 October 1985] describes LaPlante's "wispy strains on various string and wind instruments" that play from the shadows, while Tyler's insistent drums establish "a rich dialogue with McCauley … suggesting a heritage which Clara barely acknowledges." "Poetic language, music, solo performance and design blend and give a theatrical immediacy to an interior monologue," wrote Mel Gussow [in the New York Times, 20 September 1985].
Chaikin chose "excerpts that emphasize the cross-references among Kennedy's works … ; the images accrete, referring to and illuminating what came before, eventually converging on the grievous complications of an unfixed black, female identity," wrote Solomon. [According to Gussow, the] voyages are a quest for "ancestry (literary as well as genetic)" through the mind of Clara Passmore, who is both "tourist and refugee" of a Eurocentric/Hollywood culture.
David Willinger, assistant director of Solo Voyages, discusses the development of the piece in [Intersecting Boundaries], "Developing a Concert for the Spoken Voice," and includes an interview of Robbie McCauley. The collaboration of music, scene, mask, and puppets enrich the varied and expressive performance of Robbie McCauley "on her mystical pilgrimage toward self recognition" [Gussow] in this chamber piece.
Kennedy's Deadly Triplets: A Theatre Mystery and Journal (1990) includes a novella based on her experiences in London in the sixties; it is set in the theatre world. "It concerns confused identities and the [narrator's] own search for a clearer sense of self as she considers what she knows about her estranged (and possibly dead) mother" [Jean Keleher, Library Journal 115 (1 May 1990)]. The "Theatre Journal" includes Kennedy's memoirs from the same period in London; these vignettes suggest the counter-point between autobiography and the novella and rehearse important backgrounds for Kennedy the playwright.
The Ohio State Murders was given in a workshop production by the Great Lakes Theater Festival (which commissioned the work) in Cleveland, Ohio, on June 16 and 17, 1990 (three performances), at the Eldred Theatre, Case Western Reserve University, and in Yale University's "Winterfest," January 16 to February 9, 1991 (fifteen performances), at the University Theatre. Both productions were directed by Gerald Freedman. At the Great Lakes Theater Festival, Hazel Medina played the central figure, writer Suzanne Alexander, with Bellary Darden as the younger Suzanne; at Yale, the role of the "present Suzanne" was enacted by Olivia Cole and Simi Junior was "Suzanne in 1949, 1950 and 1951."
Kennedy set her play on the Ohio State University campus, "where Suzanne Alexander, a prominent black writer who attended Ohio State, has been asked back to lecture on the roots of the violent imagery in her work. Told mostly in flashback sequences that recount Alexander's student years in Columbus, The Ohio State Murders is a shocking portrait of a young black woman's struggle in the racially torn America of the late 1940's and early 1950's." If, as Kennedy says, her "plays are meant to be states of mind," then this work examines the concourse of social violence and hatred in the life and mind of a sensitive student-become-writer. Although given A's for her brilliant analysis of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbevilles, Suzanne is prevented from becoming an English major because of race; seduced by her white professor, Suzanne and her children become the victims of violence and guilt. The narrative structure allows past and present to merge in a timelessness that permits repressed fears to be a presence on the stage.
Kennedy's She Talks to Beethoven was published in Antaeus (1991); it was given a staged reading at River Arts (Woodstock, New York) in 1989. Kennedy sees the material in this play as an extension of The Ohio State Murders. The central character is also the writer, Suzanne Alexander, who writes about and speaks to Beethoven in a meditation that merges time into presence. It is framed and interrupted by radio broadcasts about Suzanne's husband, David, who is missing under mysterious circumstances; he has received threats and has disappeared to protect his wife from whom he is otherwise inseparable. Although the play is set in Legon near Accra, West Africa, Suzanne's writing concerns Beethoven's life in Vienna; the play becomes a dialogue between writer and composer merging distance and time in a bond of mutual understanding, while music sustains a continuum emphasizing the counterpoint of Eurocentric and African-American culture. Having revealed to Suzanne that her wound is not healing, Beethoven confides his deafness and his need for "conversation books" to her. Imagining this loss through reading the "conversation books," Suzanne also discovers poems and encouragement from the absent David, who left them between the leaves of the books. Finally, as Beethoven's death scene is read from Suzanne's manuscript, David returns to her side, his danger abated. Tonally unlike Kennedy's earlier writing, She Talks to Beethoven discovers connections that comfort.
The Film Club conveys the anxiety of Suzanne Alexander awaiting the release of her husband, who is detained in West Africa. Images from Bette Davis movies are counter-pointed by scenes from Dracula; compulsive walks in Windsor Park near London prefigure dread-become-hysteria when Suzanne returns to Washington. The Film Club is published with She Talks to Beethoven and The Ohio State Murders as The Alexander Plays.
Adrienne Kennedy continues to write new plays, and so conclusions about the place(s) of her oeuvre in the context of American theatre are necessarily tentative. As their production history suggests, her plays have intrigued producers and directors of the experimental stage. Among the plays on New York stages in 1964 were Samuel Beckett's Play, Harold Pinter's The Lovers, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf Eugene lonesco's Le Piéton de L'Air, Pirandello's Right You Are (If You Think You Are). Like Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro, these plays expressed the problematic of fragmented selves and self-perception; unlike them, Kennedy's materials and dramaturgy reflected a uniquely Afro-American circumstance. Also on stage in New York in 1964 were Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, Athol Fugard's Blood Knot, James Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charlie, and Lorraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, each bringing voice to racial and social issues. Among them, Kennedy's material and method was an anomaly. Michael Kahn indicates [in an interview in Intersecting Boundaries] that Kennedy's early work was ostracized because the plays were "considered neurotic and not supportive of the black movement." When Kennedy turned to a more overtly political event in An Evening with Dead Essex, critics saw a new facet in her writing, yet, no matter how deeply they are embedded within the psyche of a character, Kennedy's plays all express cultural conflict and allude to wider events (as in, for example, the Nazis in A Rat's Mass, Lumumba in Funnyhouse).
The commissioned works of the 1980s (Black Children's Day, A Lancashire Lad, and the adaptations of Orestes and Electro) were based on structures of narrative; perhaps these and the autobiographical writings (People Who Led to My Plays and Deadly Triplets) have led to the new plays, The Ohio State Murders and She Talks to Beethoven, which conflate narrator with writer.
Naturally, the reception of Kennedy's works reflected critical expectations and circumstance as much as it did the world and methods of her plays. Audiences have been confused and negative as well as enthusiastic and moved by her writing. European response, particularly in Rome (A Rat's Mass, 1966) and in Paris (Drôle de baraque, 1968), showed appreciation for Kennedy's plays, recognizing her articulation of racial politics in a personal and intense mythopoetic dramaturgy. Over the thirty years that Kennedy has been writing, American theatre has embraced new forms; the plays that invited excitement because of their challenges seem more accessible.
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