The Adrienne Kennedy Reader

Product Description


Adrienne Kennedy has been a force in American theatre since the early 1960s, influencing generations of playwrights with her hauntingly fragmentary lyrical dramas. Exploring the violence racism visits upon people's lives, Kennedy's plays express poetic alienation, transcending the particulars of character and plot through ritualistic repetition and radical structural experimentation. Frequently produced, read, and taught, they continue to hold a significant place among the most exciting dramas of the past fifty years.
This first comprehensive collection of her most important works traces the development of Kennedy's unique theatrical oeuvre from her Obie-winning Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964) through significant later works such as A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976), Ohio State Murders (1992), and June and Jean in Concert, for which she won an Obie in 1996. The entire contents of Kennedy's groundbreaking collections In One Act and The Alexander Plays are included, as is her earliest work "Because of the King of France" and the play An Evening with Dead Essex (1972). More recent prose works "Secret Paragraphs about My Brother," "A Letter to Flowers," and "Sisters Etta and Ella" are fascinating refractions of the themes and motifs of her dramatic works, even while they explore new material on teaching and writing. An introduction by Werner Sollors provides a valuable overview of Kennedy's career and the trajectory of her literary development.
Adrienne Kennedy is a three-time Obie-award winning playwright whose works have been widely anthologized and performed around the world. Among her many honors are the Guggenheim fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters award.


From Library Journal


It is a pleasure to have so much of Kennedy's output in a single volume, the first major collection of her work. Kennedy won Obie awards for her plays Funnyhouse of a Negro, June and Jean in Concert (both included here), and Sleep Deprivation Chamber (written with her son Adam). Her texts are often fragmentary, nonlinear, and experimental; they are also highly feminist and often deal with the painful topic of racism from the viewpoint of an African American woman who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s. Kennedy was inspired by many things: visits to family in Georgia, Giotto's frescoes, fairy tales, extensive travel to Europe and Africa, and Hollywood films. During a long stay in Africa and Europe, she wrote an experimental short story, "Because of the King of France," published under a pen name in the journal Black Orpheus and reprinted in this volume. Werner Sollors's (Beyond Ethnicity) introduction helpfully puts Kennedy's work into an autobiographical and theatrical context, but the plays, short stories, and other writings are the most valuable aspect of this volume. Of particular importance is a group of previously unpublished prose pieces. Recommended to academic libraries and libraries with theater collections. Susan L. Peters, Univ. of Texas, Galveston
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