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Adrienne Kennedy: Collected Plays & Other Writings (LOA #372)
Library of America presents the definitive edition of an essential figure in Black and American theater, spanning from the 1960s to the 2010s and including several works published for the first time
Adrienne Kennedy has been a force on the American stage since the premiere of her groundbreaking, Obie Award–winning Funnyhouse of a Negro in 1964. Politically engaged, formally daring, and making provocative use of material from contemporary history and popular culture, Kennedy’s haunting stage works dramatize and project interior realities that are often marked by disappointment and trauma, madness and terror. Her understanding of the inner lives of African American women expresses a powerfully insightful feminism that has come to influence generations of playwrights and writers.
Now, the Library of America presents, for the first time, a collected edition of Kennedy’s extraordinary and wide-ranging writings, spanning six decades and including ten unpublished works. Here are the early surrealistic one-acts A Lesson in Dead Language and A Rat’s Mass ; works like A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White and Film The Day Jean Seberg Died that reveal Kennedy’s longstanding fascination with Hollywood and film culture; and Ohio State Murders , one of several plays featuring her protagonist Suzanne Alexander and the first of her plays to be staged—belatedly, in 2022—on Broadway. Sleep Deprivation Chamber is a searing indictment of racially motivated police violence based on real-life incidents involving her son, who co-wrote the play. Also included here are Kennedy’s adaptations of works by Euripides, Flaubert, and John Lennon, all brilliantly reimagined.
Outside of playwriting Kennedy has made her mark as a fiction writer and memoirist, providing a rich portrait of her life and experience especially in her book People Who Led to My Plays but also in works from her later life such as the essay “Almost Eighty.” Taken together, the work gathered in Collected Plays & Other Writings is a celebration of Kennedy’s indispensable achievement on the stage and on the page alike.
Adrienne Kennedy has been a force on the American stage since the premiere of her groundbreaking, Obie Award–winning Funnyhouse of a Negro in 1964. Politically engaged, formally daring, and making provocative use of material from contemporary history and popular culture, Kennedy’s haunting stage works dramatize and project interior realities that are often marked by disappointment and trauma, madness and terror. Her understanding of the inner lives of African American women expresses a powerfully insightful feminism that has come to influence generations of playwrights and writers.
Now, the Library of America presents, for the first time, a collected edition of Kennedy’s extraordinary and wide-ranging writings, spanning six decades and including ten unpublished works. Here are the early surrealistic one-acts A Lesson in Dead Language and A Rat’s Mass ; works like A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White and Film The Day Jean Seberg Died that reveal Kennedy’s longstanding fascination with Hollywood and film culture; and Ohio State Murders , one of several plays featuring her protagonist Suzanne Alexander and the first of her plays to be staged—belatedly, in 2022—on Broadway. Sleep Deprivation Chamber is a searing indictment of racially motivated police violence based on real-life incidents involving her son, who co-wrote the play. Also included here are Kennedy’s adaptations of works by Euripides, Flaubert, and John Lennon, all brilliantly reimagined.
Outside of playwriting Kennedy has made her mark as a fiction writer and memoirist, providing a rich portrait of her life and experience especially in her book People Who Led to My Plays but also in works from her later life such as the essay “Almost Eighty.” Taken together, the work gathered in Collected Plays & Other Writings is a celebration of Kennedy’s indispensable achievement on the stage and on the page alike.
1092 pages, Hardcover
Published September 12, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 18, 2024
Kennedy is an abstract (i.e., non-naturalistic) playwright who brings to mind the fin-de-siecle surrealists, symbolists and expressionists like Artaud, Jarry and others. Maybe the later absurdists as well. For all their strangeness, the plays are emotionally charged and visceral.
These are not quite my thing. I enjoy strangeness in plays, but it is a question of just how much strangeness you want. I'm sure they are much better on stage than reading. (In fact, it is very hard to understand what is happening by the text alone. I'm not sure how they'd be produced.)
This LOA edition is, as usual, very good and very comprehensive. When reading works like these, there is of course a desire for more information, but LOA editions are well-known for their lack of supporting material.
If you enjoy surrealistic drama or you deeply explore dramatic history, this is a solid collection of Kennedy's work and is very well done.
These are not quite my thing. I enjoy strangeness in plays, but it is a question of just how much strangeness you want. I'm sure they are much better on stage than reading. (In fact, it is very hard to understand what is happening by the text alone. I'm not sure how they'd be produced.)
This LOA edition is, as usual, very good and very comprehensive. When reading works like these, there is of course a desire for more information, but LOA editions are well-known for their lack of supporting material.
If you enjoy surrealistic drama or you deeply explore dramatic history, this is a solid collection of Kennedy's work and is very well done.
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June 18, 2024i read the first short play, funnyhouse, and sleep deprivation chamber. i know i should read ohio state murders but just need a break. i can tell how provocative these works were. daring, frightening reflections of black life/trauma
August 6, 2024
This is an extraordinary collection. What a wonderful gift! Robinson’s editing is exquisite, and the notes are so incredibly thorough here. The collection here includes everything we have of Kennedy’s all in one place. Her many plays (including many previously unpublished works), her stories, and her memoirs. Reading all of these texts together changes the way you can read Kennedy. Robinson has, quite appropriately, placed them next to one another chronologically, but also what is chronology to Adrienne Kennedy? What becomes so clear, reading these texts, is the way time always interrupts everything, or perhaps I mean that time is always interrupted in Kennedy. What she gets at is the way that our lives are interrupted by memories, by flashes from the past, by dreams of possible futures, by fantasies of what happened, what might happen, by fantasies of different possible selves, versions of ourselves that we have conceived that we don’t understand or haven’t even consciously acknowledged. This is a dream literature.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews