Adrienne Kennedy’s Life Writing

I still struggle to articulate fully what a profound sense of loss I felt, not being able to participate in the ritual of theatregoing during the era of mandated physical distancing. As much of my writing in the pages of PAJ over the years reflects, I derive tremendous joy and fulfillment from the experience of attending live performance events. Indeed, I have come to regard it as essential to my overall sense of well-being. Spending a seemingly endless number of days conducting my professional, personal, and social life in virtual spaces only served to underscore just how impossible it is to replicate the thrill of engaging in acts of collective spectatorship, despite the valiant efforts that many artists around the globe made to try and keep themselves and their cloistered audiences connected and invigorated creatively.Of course, while disruptions to regular rhythms and routines are often disorienting, they can also present rich opportunities to make unexpected discoveries. This was certainly the case for me when I found myself questioning how to maintain a zest for theatregoing and theatre-making in a moment when neither was possible to practice in familiar ways. I became particularly curious about how other artists, especially those who have enjoyed long careers, found inspiration to continue to pursue their practices amid catalytic and sometimes tumultuous changes. An email from Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland announcing a virtual festival celebrating the work of pioneering playwright Adrienne Kennedy would prove both timely and galvanizing as I navigated these and other existential ponderings. In addition to heralding Kennedy as one of the most influential, if underappreciated dramatists of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, the message also provided details about a series of conversations and view-on-demand presentations of four of Kennedy’s plays that the company, working in partnership with the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey, would make available to homebound audiences in late 2020 and early 2021. With a career stretching back to the heyday of the civil rights movement, reading the message spurred immediate excitement about the valuable revelations that delving deeper into Kennedy’s life and work might surface for what it means and, indeed, requires to persevere as a maker and lover of the arts.While tuning in to the festival’s absorbing programming on my computer from my dining room table did not fully alleviate my longing to share the experience in real-time with others, it did activate a newfound admiration for Kennedy’s fascinating writing life. Part of what I discovered is that Kennedy’s personal and professional journeys have been as marked by experimentation and fragmentation as the stories that she has crafted for the page and stage. Having spent many of her formative years moving between urban Cleveland, Ohio, where she lived with her parents and brother in a kind of Black middle-class bliss, and rural Montezuma, Georgia, where she was keen on soaking up every detail of the imaginative ways of being in the world that her grandparents and other southern relatives embodied, Kennedy had developed an appreciation for drama, in particular, early on. Indeed, by the time she arrived at Ohio State University for her freshman year in 1949, she already had a sense that dramatic writing was a craft worth pursuing and honing.Kennedy’s remarkable body of dramatic works has captivated audiences and readers alike for decades, and the recent publication of The Library of America’s edition of Adrienne Kennedy: Collected Plays & Other Writings illuminates just how prolific a writer she has been.1 Expertly edited by Marc Robinson, the book offers both old and new admirers the opportunity to delve into the richness of Kennedy’s singular storytelling. I imagine that, as for me, the plays are what will initially attract most people to the collection. Alongside groundbreaking one-acts such as Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), The Owl Answers (1965), and Ohio State Murders (1992), Robinson anthologizes over two dozen of Kennedy’s other dramatic pieces in the book, some appearing in print for the first time. These include collaborations with her son, Adam P. Kennedy, like Sleep Deprivation Chamber (1996) and Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? (2008), as well as her adaptations of Greek tragedies Electra (1980) and Orestes (1980), and her dramatization of John Lennon’s In His Own Write, titled The Lennon Play: In His Own Write (1968).Equally deserving of attention, of course, are the “other writings” that Robinson has so meticulously and thoughtfully curated for readers—a range of non-dramatic texts that illuminate the perceptiveness of Kennedy’s writerly imagination, while also speaking to her enduring drive to create. In exploring these pieces, I found myself eager to unearth what further revelations that the personal reflections embedded in and across many of them would surface about the contexts and motivations that have propelled Kennedy’s artistic practice and output. In “A Growth of Images” (1977), for example, she observes that she has long been preoccupied with autobiographical concerns. “Autobiographical work is the only thing that interests me, apparently because that is what I do best,” the author writes. Given her acknowledgment of the ways ideas and events from her own life have influenced the projects that she has created for the stage, it is difficult not to be compelled and charmed by those instances in Kennedy’s non-dramatic writing where she draws direct connections between moments she experienced or heard about with those that she ultimately gave new dramatic life to in and through her theatrical storytelling. Of course, as scholars of Black women’s life writing such as Angela A. Ards remind us, attending to the personal narratives Black people construct can offer “new ways of thinking about Black politics and identity.”2 My examinations of Kennedy’s engagements with the autobiographical mode in what follows are thus spurred by an impulse both to illuminate how the fact of her Blackness has intersected with her artistry and to deepen understandings of the ideas and happenings that have influenced her to keep pressing onward.Kennedy speaks to the fact that various supporters of her work have expressed curiosities about her influences in People Who Led to My Plays (1987). She begins the piece by explaining, “More and more often as my plays are performed in colleges and taught in universities, people ask me why I write as I do.” She notes that such people are especially keen to inquire: “Who influenced you to write in such a nonlinear way” and “Who are your favorite playwrights?” People Who Led to My Plays sees Kennedy provide a striking litany of responses to these queries—from fairies who “waived magic wands and everything became different” to the spirituals through which she discovered that she “belonged to a race of people who were in touch with a kingdom of spirituality and mystery beyond my visible sight.” The mention of the 1942 British film, Mrs. Miniver, is of particular note. Kennedy reflects, “The movie, which I saw at age eleven, with Greer Garson as Mrs. Miniver, showed me that I had a desire for drama!” In reading about how Kennedy and her childhood best friend used to fight over who would play Mrs. Miniver in their backyard reenactments of the movie, I am reminded of the ways Lorraine Hansberry also invokes the character to underscore the fortitude of the matriarch of the family at the center of her A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Lena Younger, and to imbue the drama of the character’s everyday life with a moment of levity and beauty.There are fragmentary references to various other playwrights and their dramatic works—Anton Chekhov, Lillian Hellman, Federico Garcia Lorca, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, William Shakespeare, Thornton Wilder, and Tennessee Williams, among others. On The Glass Menagerie, Kennedy writes, “I saw the play and for the first time understood there were other family secrets, family joys and sorrows, just as in my own family.” Notably, to the question of her penchant for refusing consequential sequence in her dramaturgy, Kennedy cites the profound impression that seeing the action paintings of Jackson Pollock up close left on her: “After seeing his work at the Museum of Modern Art, I thought continually of how to write (was it possible?) without a linear narrative.” An encounter with Picasso’s masterwork Guernica (1937) at the same museum, she notes, likewise had an impact on her approach to world-building: “After I saw Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art, the concept of placing my characters in a dream domain seemed more and more real to me.” It is fitting that Kennedy ends the piece by recognizing once more that she is one of the people who should be acknowledged for being instrumental in the creation of her work. In taking in the various details Kennedy recounts as she moves from her early years growing up amid the trappings of life under Jim Crow to her sojourns abroad in the 1960s, it is hard not to be inspired by the vastness of her life experiences.When in “On the Writing of Funnyhouse of a Negro” (2001), Kennedy explains that, although she had taken to working on the one-act during a stint in Ghana, she felt an urgency to complete the script during a stay with her young son Joe in Rome, one can only marvel at just how adventurous and peripatetic her life has been. “Ten months earlier at the end of September 1960 my husband Joe and I left New York on the Queen Elizabeth. It was my first sight of Europe and Africa. We stopped in London, Paris, Madrid, Casablanca and lived in Monrovia, Liberia before we settled in Accra, Ghana,” she recalls. Funnyhouse would not have been possible without her travels in these places, as they provided the play with some of its signature imagery. Indeed, Kennedy likely would not have finished the play at all if it had not been for the impending birth of her second son, Adam, which she feared might draw her attention away from writing. “I finished Funnyhouse of a Negro the last week of July 1961. Our son Adam was born August 1,” she concludes the piece, thereby endowing the concept of life writing with additional layers of meaning.In “Paragraphs, Passages, and Pages that Changed My Life” (2005), Kennedy once again illustrates what honing a voracious reading practice can do for those who dare to claim “writer” as an identity. The capaciousness of her reading interests is on full display here, and the lessons gleaned from reading widely are revealed in the passages she opts to cite. From Aristotle’s Poetics, for example, it is a quotation about the function of the writer: “The poet’s function is to describe not the thing that has happened but a kind of thing that might happen.” The writer, we can presume from this, has some responsibility to attend to possibility and potentiality in their work. From The Glass Menagerie, it is one of Tom’s more poetic lines that continues to reverberate for Kennedy: “I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further.” For her, she notes, the moon seemed like a worthy destination. Passages like this from writers that she greatly admired only served to intensify for Kennedy a desire to make her own lasting impressions by arranging and rearranging words on the page—and to do so to dramatic effect. Notably, it was Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy that revealed to her the value of attending to her dreams. “I had many violent dreams, so often I reread Nietzsche’s passages on dream life from The Birth of Tragedy,” she reflects, adding: “But I didn’t yet see my dreams as connected to my writing, as they soon would become. A few years later I would keep a dream notebook and steal images from my dreams to strengthen my work.” Returning to many of the paragraphs, passages, and pages she catalogues in the piece becomes a key source of inspiration and strength for Kennedy. When she was feeling weary about her very disciplined daily writing habits, for example, she might dive back into a passage by Lucretius. “I needed these passages and pages from literature as friends. People who knew me thought it odd that I was constantly writing.” But constantly write, Kennedy did—even after she and her husband, Joseph, who, as she points out several times, had been supportive of her literary pursuits from the very beginning of their marriage, decided to divorce in 1966.Certainly, much like parenting, writing endowed Kennedy with a hunger to want to keep thriving. It comes as a shock, then, that she opens the piece, “Almost Eighty” (2020), by asserting that “At almost eighty, I wondered if I could find reasons to live.” Birthdays are often fraught occasions precisely because of the introspection they inevitably invite about whether our lived realities are in alignment with our dreams and expectations. Kennedy cites the lack of dreams, something that she had come to rely on for bursts of creativity, as particularly worrying—alongside a lack of energy and purpose. “I’d already decided if I can’t find reasons to live, then what’s the point? What can I embark on at eighty? What could I possibly embark on?” The new beginnings indexed by the notion of “embarking” had always managed to stir fresh yearnings. Approaching eighty, Kennedy admits, those yearnings were becoming harder and harder to come by. And yet, as the piece itself demonstrates, she still found energy and purpose to write about the scrapbook that her mother began assembling during her college years at Atlanta University in the late 1920s. From its crimson cover bordered by flowers in hues of pink and green to the photographs and mementos it contained documenting major moments of transition—from commencements to new jobs to blossoming romances—Kennedy finds in the scrapbook pages evidence of lives well-lived and full of aspiration and meaning. “I see I can still seek the perfect life. They also sought God. I can still seek God,” she writes, before concluding: “and I must continue.” Of course, not too long after she first penned “Almost Eighty” in 2011, Kennedy’s He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box (2018) received a premiere production at Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience. Having a new play produced in your eighties is surely illustrative of the drive to write—and to live too.Perhaps what Kennedy’s life writing on an extraordinary writing life demonstrates most powerfully are the ways that the languages we develop to articulate our experiences and to imagine others are also what can create the conditions for enduring.