Adrienne Kennedy

In 2018 she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. 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." Kennedy is noted for the use of surrealism in her plays, which are often plotless and symbolic, drawing on mythical, historical, and imaginary figures to depict and explore the African-American experience. 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 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 gone, Adrienne Kennedy is probably the boldest artist now writing for the theater." Kennedy has also written in other genres, including poetry and essays.

• Name — Adrienne Kennedy • Birth Name — Adrienne Lita Hawkins • Born — 13 September 1931 • Birthplace — Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. • Children — 2 • Occupation — Playwright, professor, poet • Movement — Black Arts Movement • Education — Ohio State University (BA) Columbia University • Awards — American Book Award; Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers' Award; Obie Awards; Dramatists Guild of America Lifetime Achievement Award • Notable Works — Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964); Ohio State Murders (1992)

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, attending Cleveland public schools. 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 Funnyhouse of a Negro, 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 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. 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 (1979–1980), University of California, Berkeley (1986), Harvard University (1991), Stanford University, 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 at the James Earl Jones Theatre 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 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.

Suzanne Alexander is a recurring character in several of Kennedy's plays. She Talks to Beethoven, 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, 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."

• Funnyhouse of a Negro, 1964 • The Owl Answers, 1965 • A Rat's Mass, 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 and Orestes (adapted from Euripides' plays), 1980 • An Evening with Dead Essex (one-act documentary drama), 1973 • A Movie Star Has To Star in Black and White, 1976 • A Lancashire Lad (children's musical), 1980 • Black Children's Day (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 • Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side, 2023

• "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 and Grendel's Mother" (essay), 1999 • "The Landscape of Memory: Letters From Playwright Adrienne Kennedy" (an email exchange with Juilliard School student Ryan Spahn, 2013) • "Forget" (poem), 2016; in New Daughters of Africa (ed. Margaret Busby), 2019