Adrienne Kennedy (born September 13, 1931) is an American

playwright A playwright or dramatist is a person who writes plays. Etymology The word "play" is from Middle English pleye, from Old English plæġ, pleġa, plæġa ("play, exercise; sport, game; drama, applause"). The word "wright" is an archaic English ...

.Peterson, Jane T., and Suzanne Bennett. "Adrienne Kennedy". ''Women Playwrights of Diversity''. Westport, CT:

Greenwood Press Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. (GPG), also known as ABC-Clio/Greenwood (stylized ABC-CLIO/Greenwood), is an educational and academic publisher (middle school through university level) which is today part of ABC-Clio. Established in 1967 as Gr ...

, 1997. 201–205. She is best known for ''

Funnyhouse of a Negro ''Funnyhouse of a Negro'' is a one-act play by Adrienne Kennedy. The play opened off-Broadway in 1964 and won the Obie Award for Distinguished Play. The play shared this award with Amiri Baraka's '' Dutchman'', and was influenced by her radical ...

'', which premiered in 1964 and won an

Obie Award The Obie Awards or Off-Broadway Theater Awards are annual awards originally given by ''The Village Voice'' newspaper to theatre artists and groups in New York City. In September 2014, the awards were jointly presented and administered with the A ...

. Harry Ransom Center. "Biographical sketch".
Adrienne Kennedy: An Inventory of Her Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
'. University of Texas at Austin. She won a lifetime Obie as well. In 2018 she was inducted into the

Theater Hall of Fame The American Theater Hall of Fame in New York City was founded in 1972. Earl Blackwell was the first head of the organization's Executive Committee. In an announcement in 1972, he said that the new ''Theater Hall of Fame'' would be located in the ...

. In 2022, Kennedy received the Gold Medal for Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; given every six years, it has been awarded to only 16 people, including Eugene O'Neill. Kennedy has been contributing to American theater since the early 1960s, influencing generations of playwrights with her haunting, fragmentary lyrical dramas. Exploring the violence racism brings to people's lives, Kennedy's plays express poetic alienation, transcending the particulars of character and plot through ritualistic repetition and radical structural experimentation. Much of her work explores issues of race, kinship, and violence in American society, and many of her plays are "autobiographically inspired."Sollors, Werner. "Introduction", ''The Adrienne Kennedy Reader'', Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, p. vii.
"An introduction to the playwright's work"
A.R.T.) Kennedy is noted for the use of

surrealism Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to l ...

in her plays, which are often plotless and symbolic, drawing on mythical, historical, and imaginary figures to depict and explore the African-American experience.Wilkerson, Margaret B. "Adrienne Kennedy", in

Thadious M. Davis Thadious M. Davis is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is best known for her work on African American and Southern literature. Education and career Davis ...

and

Trudier Harris Trudier Harris (born February 1948) is an American literary scholar, author, and Professor Emerita at the University of Alabama. She was the J. Carlyle Sitterson Distinguished Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Biography Ha ...

(eds), ''Afro-American Writers after 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers''.

Dictionary of Literary Biography The ''Dictionary of Literary Biography'' is a specialist biographical dictionary dedicated to literature. Published by Gale, the 375-volume setRogers, 106. covers a wide variety of literary topics, periods, and genres, with a focus on American an ...

vol. 38. Detroit: Gale, 1985, p. 163. In 1969, '' The New York Times'' critic Clive Barnes wrote: "While almost every black playwright in the country is fundamentally concerned with realism—

LeRoi Jones Amiri Baraka (born Everett Leroy Jones; October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014), previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and music criticism. He was the author of numerous bo ...

and Ed Bullins at times have something different going but even their symbolism is straightforward stuff—Miss Kennedy is weaving some kind of dramatic fabric of poetry." In 1995, critic Michael Feingold of the '' Village Voice'' wrote that, "with

Samuel Beckett Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic expe ...

gone, Adrienne Kennedy is probably the boldest artist now writing for the theater." Kennedy has also written in other genres, including poetry and essays.

Life and career

Adrienne Kennedy was born Adrienne Lita Hawkins on September 13, 1931, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Etta Hawkins, was a teacher, and her father, Cornell Wallace Hawkins, was a social worker. She spent most of her childhood in

Cleveland, Ohio Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across the U.S. ...

, attending Cleveland public schools.Andrews, William L., et al
"Adrienne Kennedy"
in William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster and Trudier Harris (eds), ''The Oxford Companion to African American Literature'', New York: Oxford, 1997. 418–19. She grew up in an integrated neighborhood and did not experience much racism until attending college at Ohio State University. As a child, she spent most of her time reading books like '' Jane Eyre'' and '' The Secret Garden'' instead of playing games with other children. She admired actors like Orson Welles and began to focus on theater during her teenage years. '' The Glass Menagerie'' was among the first plays she saw produced, inspiring her to explore her passion for playwriting. Her interest in playwriting continued when she started at Ohio State in 1949. She graduated from Ohio State in 1953 with a bachelor's degree in education and continued her studies at Columbia University in 1954–56. She married Joseph Kennedy on May 15, 1953, a month after graduating from Ohio State, and the couple had two children, Joseph Jr. and Adam P. Kennedy. They divorced in 1966. Her first play to be produced was ''

'', a one-act play she wrote in 1960, the year she visited Ghana for a few months with her husband on his grant from the African Research Foundation. The play draws on Kennedy's African and European heritage as she explores a "black woman's psyche, riven by personal and inherited psychosis, at the root of which is the ambiguously double failure of both rapacious white society and its burdened yet also distorted victims." ''A Rat's Mass'' was produced at

La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (La MaMa E.T.C.) is an Off-Off-Broadway theatre founded in 1961 by Ellen Stewart, African-American theatre director, producer, and fashion designer. Located in Manhattan's East Village, the theatre began in the ...

in Manhattan's East Village twice in 1969 and once in 1971. In 1976, La MaMa's Annex performed the show with music by

Cecil Taylor Cecil Percival Taylor (March 25, 1929April 5, 2018) was an American pianist and poet. Taylor was classically trained and was one of the pioneers of free jazz. His music is characterized by an energetic, physical approach, resulting in complex ...

. ''Sun: A Poem for Malcolm X Inspired By His Death'' and ''A Beast Story'' were both produced at La MaMa in 1974. Kennedy was a founding member of the Women's Theatre Council in 1971, a member of the board of directors of PEN in 1976–77, and an International Theatre Institute representative in Budapest, Hungary, in 1978. Kennedy has taught or lectured at Yale University (1972–74), Princeton University (1977),

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

(1979–1980), University of California, Berkeley (1986), Harvard University (1991),

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, New York University, and University of California, Davis. Her memoir ''People Who Led to My Plays'', first published in 1987, was reissued in 2016. As of 2018, Kennedy has written thirteen published and five unpublished plays, several autobiographies, a novella, and a short story. Kennedy used the alias Adrienne Cornell for the short story "Because of the King of France", published in '' Black Orpheus: A Journal of African and Afro-American Literature'' in 1963. Much of Kennedy's work is based on her lived experience. In 2022, Kennedy made her Broadway debut with the opening of her 1992 play ''

Ohio State Murders Overview ''Ohio State Murders'' is a play written by Adrienne Kennedy. The play first published on January 14, 1991. The play was first performed January 14 – February 9, 1991 at Yale Repertory Theatre's Winterfest, starring Olivia Cole. It was ...

'' at the

James Earl Jones Theatre The James Earl Jones Theatre, originally the Cort Theatre, is a Broadway theater at 138 West 48th Street, between Seventh Avenue and Sixth Avenue, in the Theater District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States. It was built in ...

on December 8, starring Audra McDonald, and directed by Kenny Leon. with its last performance taking place on January 15, 2023. Speaking in an interview with ''

Time Out Time-out, Time Out, or timeout may refer to: Time * Time-out (sport), in various sports, a break in play, called by a team * Television timeout, a break in sporting action so that a commercial break may be taken * Timeout (computing), an enginee ...

'' magazine about what she hopes audiences will take away from seeing the play, Kennedy stated: "I want them to realize that they're listening to a very articulate, thoughtful American Black woman and, perhaps, they should pay attention to what she's saying." Despite its appraisal, its showtime was closed early due to its lack of commercial success and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had affected the revival of commercial theater in New York since then. The production received positive reviews and McDonald received a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play for her role.

''The Alexander Plays'' (1992)

Suzanne Alexander is a recurring character in several of Kennedy's plays. ''She Talks to Beethoven'', ''The Ohio State Murders'', ''The Film Club'', and ''The Dramatic Circle'' are collectively known as the Alexander Plays, and were published together under that title in 1992. A letter written from Suzanne Alexander's perspective, "Letter to My Students on My Sixty-First Birthday by Suzanne Alexander", was also published in 1992. The Alexander Plays are less overtly surreal than many of Kennedy's earlier works, but still avoid linear narrative. In the foreword to the printed collection of plays,

Alisa Solomon Alisa Solomon, is a writer, Professor of Journalism, and the Director of the Arts and Culture concentration at the Columbia Journalism School. Born in 1956, Solomon served as a story consultant for the documentary on the musical '' Fiddler on the ...

, professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, wrote that "the action of these plays is made up not of the events of Suzanne's life but of the process of turning memory into meaning."Solomon, Alisa. "Foreword", ''The Alexander Plays''. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, p. xvi. .

Awards and honors

Kennedy won several awards for her plays, including a Stanley Drama Award (1963) from the New York City Writers Conference at Wagner College, two '' Village Voice''

s. Her Obie Awards were for "Distinguished Play" in 1964 for ''Funnyhouse of a Negro'' and "Best New American Play" in 1996 for ''June and Jean in Concert'' and ''Sleep Deprivation Chamber''. She was also honored at the 2008 Obie Awards with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Kennedy was granted a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

for Creative Writing in 1967,

Rockefeller Foundation The Rockefeller Foundation is an American private foundation and philanthropic medical research and arts funding organization based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The second-oldest major philanthropic institution in America, after the Carneg ...

grants in 1967 and again in 1970, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1972, the Creative Artists Public Service grant in 1974, the 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, and the Pierre Lecomte du Noüy Award.Wilkerson, "Adrienne Kennedy", in Davis and Harris (eds), ''Afro-American Writers after 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers''. Dictionary of Literary Biography vol 38. 1985, p. 168.Ohio State honors six at spring 2003 commencement"
Columbus, OH: Ohio State University, News and Information, June 5, 2003. Kennedy received the Third Annual Manhattan Borough President's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1988. In 1990, Kennedy received the American Book Award. In 1994, Kennedy won the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers' Award and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in Literature. In July 1995, Kennedy was named playwright in residence for the September 1995–May 1996 season with the

Signature Theater Company A signature (; from la, signare, "to sign") is a handwritten (and often stylized) depiction of someone's name, nickname, or even a simple "X" or other mark that a person writes on documents as a proof of identity and intent. The writer of a ...

in New York City. In 2003, Kennedy was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Literature by her undergraduate alma mater, Ohio State University. In 2006, Kennedy received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a Master American Dramatist. In November 2020, the Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland, in association with the

McCarter Theatre Center McCarter Theatre Center is a not-for-profit, professional company on the campus of Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. The institution is currently led by Artistic Director Sarah Rasmussen and Managing Director Michael S. Rosenberg. ...

Princeton, N.J. Princeton is a municipality with a borough form of government in Mercer County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township, both of wh ...

, launched ''The Work of Adrienne Kennedy: Inspiration and Influence'', a digital festival of filmed readings of her plays, which attracted much acclaim. In 2021, the Dramatists Guild of America named Kennedy as recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award, presented "in recognition of distinguished lifetime achievement in theatrical writing". The Dramatists Guild's president, Amanda Green, said in a statement: "Adrienne Kennedy has used her immense storytelling skill with beautifully brutal imagery to share her theatrical dreamscapes with the world....From 1964's ''Funnyhouse of a Negro'' to 2018's ''He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box'', Adrienne has inspired countless young writers by remaining true to herself and her voice, knowing that what she had to say would resonate." In 2022, Kennedy was awarded the Gold Medal for Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2023, Kennedy was honored with a Special Citation from the

New York Drama Critics Circle The New York Drama Critics' Circle is made up of 22 drama critics from daily newspapers, magazines and wire services based in the New York City metropolitan area. The organization is best known for its annual awards for excellence in theater.Jone ...

. Her ''Collected Plays & Other Writings'' were published in the prestigious Library of America series, on the day before her ninety-second birthday.

Works

Plays

* ''

'', 1964 * ''

The Owl Answers ''The Owl Answers'' is a one-act experimental play by Adrienne Kennedy. It premiered in 1965 at the White Barn Theatre in Westport, Connecticut one year after Kennedy's most well-known piece, the Obie Award-winning ''Funnyhouse of a Negro''. Sub ...

'', 1965 * ''

A Rat's Mass ''A Rat's Mass'' is a poetic, magical-realist one-act play by Adrienne Kennedy, a 20th-century African-American playwright. The play portrays the negative aspects of the black experience in the United States by depicting two African-American child ...

'', 1967 * ''The Lennon Play: In His Own Write'' (adapted from John Lennon's '' In His Own Write'' and '' A Spaniard in the Works'' with Victor Spinetti), 1967 * ''A Beast's Story'', 1969 (produced with ''The Owl Answers'' as ''Cities in Bezique'') * ''Boats'', 1969 * ''Sun: A Play for Malcolm X Inspired by His Murder'' (monologue), 1968 * ''A Lesson in Dead Language'', 1968 * ''

Electra Electra (; grc, Ήλέκτρα) is one of the most popular mythological characters in tragedies.Evans (1970), p. 79 She is the main character in two Greek tragedies, '' Electra'' by Sophocles and '' Electra'' by Euripides. She is also the centra ...

'' and '' Orestes'' (adapted from Euripides' plays), 1980 * ''An Evening with Dead Essex'' (one-act documentary drama), 1972 * '' A Movie Star Has To Star in Black and White'', 1976 * ''A Lancashire Lad'' (children's musical), 1980 * ''

Black Children's Day ''Black Children's Day'' is a one-act play written in 1980 by Adrienne Kennedy. It was commissioned by Brown University, and was revised in 1988. Kennedy is an African American playwright. Her plays often use surrealism as an element to explore ...

'' (children's play), 1980 * ''Diary of Lights'' ("A Musical Without Songs"), 1987 * ''She Talks to Beethoven'' (one-act play, later collected as part of ''The Alexander Plays''), 1989 * '' The Ohio State Murders'' (one-act play, later collected as part of ''The Alexander Plays''), 1992 * ''The Film Club'' (monologue by Suzanne Alexander), 1992 * ''The Dramatic Circle'' ( radio drama based on ''The Film Club''; published 1994 in ''Moon Marked and Touched By Sun: Plays by African-American Women'', edited by Sydné Mahone), 1992 * ''Motherhood 2000'' (single scene short play), 1994 * ''June and Jean in Concert'' (play version of Kennedy's book ''People Who Led to My Plays''), 1995 * ''Sleep Deprivation Chamber'' (with son Adam P. Kennedy), 1996 * ''Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles?'' (with Adam P. Kennedy), 2008 * ''He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box'', 2018

Other works

* "Because of the King of France" (short story), 1960. Published in '' Black Orpheus'' in 1963 * ''People Who Led to My Plays'' (memoir), 1987. Reissued 2016. * ''Deadly Triplets'' (novella), 1990 * "Letter to My Students on My Sixty-First Birthday by Suzanne Alexander" (essay), 1992 * "Secret Paragraphs about My Brother" (essay), 1996 * "A Letter to Flowers" (essay), 1998 * "Sisters Etta and Ella (excerpt from a narrative)", 1999 * "Grendel Grendel's Mother" (essay), 1999 * "Forget" (poem), 2016; in '' New Daughters of Africa'' (ed.

Margaret Busby Margaret Yvonne Busby, , Hon. FRSL (born 1944), also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisherJazzmine Breary"Let' ...

), 2019

Collected editions

* ''The Alexander Plays'', 1992 * ''Collected Plays & Other Writings'' (Marc Robinson, ed.), 2023

References

External links

Adrienne Kennedy Papers
an
Lois More Overbeck Collection of Adrienne Kennedy
at the Harry Ransom Center
Kennedy's page on La MaMa Archives Digital Collections

, doollee.com (subscription required)
Archived profile of Adrienne Kennedy
* Ryan Spahn
"Spawned From Deep Experience: Corresponding With Adrienne Kennedy
''Juilliard Journal'', February 2013 * Alexis Soloski

''The New York Times'', January 10, 2018 *

Hilton Als Hilton Als (born 1960) is an American writer and theater critic. He is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, an associate professor of writing at Columbia University and a staff writer and theater critic for ''The New Yor ...

"Adrienne Kennedy’s Startling Body of Work"
'' The New Yorker'', February 12 & 19, 2018. * Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
"Unraveling the Landscape: A Conversation With Adrienne Kennedy"
''American Theatre'', September 2019.
"The Lasting Impact of Adrienne Kennedy"
Ohio State University, March 15, 2022. {{DEFAULTSORT:Kennedy, Adrienne 1931 births Postmodern theatre 20th-century African-American women writers 20th-century African-American writers 20th-century American dramatists and playwrights 20th-century American women writers 21st-century African-American women writers 21st-century African-American writers 21st-century American dramatists and playwrights 21st-century American women writers African-American dramatists and playwrights African-American memoirists African-American women memoirists American women memoirists African-American poets American Book Award winners American women academics American women dramatists and playwrights American women essayists Brown University faculty Harvard University faculty Living people New York University faculty Ohio State University alumni Princeton University faculty Stanford University faculty University of California, Berkeley faculty University of California, Davis faculty Writers from Pittsburgh Yale University faculty