Identity in Crisis: Navigating Symbols of Internal and External Conflicts in Motherhood 2000 and The Hairy Ape

Abstract Theatre has long served as a medium to explore the complexities of human identity, oppression, and psychological conflict, offering dramatized representations of individuals caught in the struggles between personal agency and external societal forces. Adrienne Kennedy’s Motherhood 2000 and Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape are two seminal works that, despite differing historical and thematic contexts, share a common concern with fractured identity, alienation, and the power structures that shape human existence. While Kennedy’s play employs surrealism and fragmentation to depict racial and gendered trauma, O’Neill’s expressionist work explores the dehumanization of the working class in an industrialized world. Both plays emphasize the protagonists’ crises of selfhood as they attempt to navigate environments that reject and oppress them. This paper aims to investigate the symbolism and theatrical techniques employed by Kennedy and O’Neill to convey internal psychological turmoil and external socio-political struggles. Through an interdisciplinary approach incorporating Theatre of the Oppressed, and postmodern identity theory, this study will examine how these works depict displacement, resistance, and the failure to reconcile fractured identities. The research will demonstrate how the stage becomes a site of contestation, reflecting the power struggles that define race, class, and gender in modern drama. Keywords: identity, symbolism, class, resistance, revenge, belonging