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."[5]
Kennedy is noted for the use ofsurrealism in her plays, which are often plotless and symbolic, drawing on mythical, historical, and imaginary figures to depict and explore theAfrican-American experience.[6]
In 1969,The New York Times criticClive Barnes wrote: "While almost every black playwright in the country is fundamentally concerned with realism—LeRoi Jones andEd 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."[7] In 1995, criticMichael Feingold of theVillage Voice wrote that, "withSamuel Beckett gone, Adrienne Kennedy is probably the boldest artist now writing for the theater."[8] Kennedy has also written in other genres, including poetry and essays.
Adrienne Kennedy was born Adrienne Lita Hawkins on September 13, 1931, inPittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Etta Hawkins,[9] was a teacher, and her father, Cornell Wallace Hawkins, was a social worker. She spent most of her childhood inCleveland, Ohio, attendingCleveland public schools.[10] She grew up in an integrated neighborhood and did not experience much racism until attending college atOhio State University. As a child, she spent most of her time reading books likeJane Eyre andThe Secret Garden instead of playing games with other children.
She admired actors likeOrson 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 forplaywriting. Her interest in playwriting continued when she started at Ohio State in 1949. She graduated from Ohio State in 1953 with abachelor's degree in education and continued her studies atColumbia University in 1954–56. She married Joseph Kennedy on May 15, 1953, a month after graduating from Ohio State,[11] and the couple had two children, Joseph Jr. andAdam P. Kennedy.[10] They divorced in 1966.[12]
Her first play to be produced wasFunnyhouse of a Negro, a one-act play she wrote in 1960, the year she visitedGhana for a few months with her husband on his grant from the African Research Foundation.[13] 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."[14]
Kennedy was a founding member of the Women's Theatre Council in 1971, a member of the board of directors ofPEN in 1976–77, and anInternational Theatre Institute representative inBudapest, Hungary, in 1978.[10]
Her memoirPeople Who Led to My Plays, first published in 1987, was reissued in 2016.[22]
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 inBlack Orpheus: A Journal of African and Afro-American Literature in 1963.[23] Much of Kennedy's work is based on her lived experience.[10]
In 2022, Kennedy made her Broadway debut with the opening of her 1992 playOhio State Murders at theJames Earl Jones Theatre[24][25][26] on December 8, starringAudra McDonald, and directed byKenny Leon.[27][28][29] with its last performance taking place on January 15, 2023.[30] Speaking in an interview withTime 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."[31] 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.[32] The production received positive reviews and McDonald received aTony Award nomination forBest Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play for her role.[33]
Suzanne Alexander is a recurring character in several of Kennedy's plays.She Talks to Beethoven,Ohio State Murders,The Film Club, andThe Dramatic Circle are collectively known as the Alexander Plays, and were published together under that title in 1992.[34] 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 theGraduate 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."[35]
Kennedy won several awards for her plays, including a Stanley Drama Award (1963) from the New York City Writers Conference atWagner College,[36] twoVillage VoiceObie Awards. Her Obie Awards were for "Distinguished Play" in 1964 forFunnyhouse of a Negro[37] and "Best New American Play" in 1996 forJune and Jean in Concert andSleep Deprivation Chamber.[38] She was also honored at the 2008 Obie Awards with a Lifetime Achievement Award.[39]
Kennedy was granted aGuggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1967,Rockefeller Foundation grants in 1967 and again in 1970, a fellowship from theNational Endowment for the Arts in 1972, the Creative Artists Public Service grant in 1974, the 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award from theAnisfield-Wolf Book Awards,[40] and the Pierre Lecomte du Noüy Award.[1][41][42] Kennedy received the Third Annual Manhattan Borough President's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1988.[43]
In 2021, theDramatists Guild of America named Kennedy as recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award, presented "in recognition of distinguished lifetime achievement in theatrical writing".[55][56] The Dramatists Guild's president, Amanda Green, said in a statement: "Adrienne Kennedy has used her immense storytelling skill with beautifully brutal imagery to share her theatrical dreamscapes with the world....From 1964'sFunnyhouse of a Negro to 2018'sHe Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, Adrienne has inspired countless young writers by remaining true to herself and her voice, knowing that what she had to say would resonate."[57]
In 2023, Kennedy was honored with a Special Citation from theNew York Drama Critics Circle.[59] HerCollected Plays & Other Writings were published in the prestigiousLibrary of America series, on the day before her ninety-second birthday.[60]
She Talks to Beethoven (one-act play, later collected as part ofThe Alexander Plays), 1989
The Ohio State Murders (one-act play, later collected as part ofThe Alexander Plays), 1992
The Film Club (monologue by Suzanne Alexander), 1992
The Dramatic Circle (radio drama based onThe Film Club; published 1994 inMoon 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 bookPeople Who Led to My Plays), 1995
^abcdAndrews, William L., et al."Adrienne Kennedy", in William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster and Trudier Harris (eds),The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, New York:Oxford, 1997. 418–19.
^Gates, Henry Louis Jr., et al. "Adrienne Kennedy", in Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Valerie A. Smith (eds),Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 3rd edition. Vol. 2, New York: Norton, 2014, pp. 617–19.
^Wilkerson, "Adrienne Kennedy", in Davis and Harris (eds),Afro-American Writers after 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers. Dictionary of Literary Biography vol 38. 1985, p. 168.
