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Adrienne Kennedy: Collected Plays & Other Writings

Edited by Marc Robinson

“People will be reading Adrienne Kennedy’s works for centuries to come.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week “Secret Paragraphs about My Brother,” Adrienne Kennedy
September 13, 2024

News “She Knows So Much of Love”: Charting Playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s Reverence for the World around Her
October 31, 2023

Video The Startling Theater of Adrienne Kennedy
October 26, 2023

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. Her haunting and powerful plays, filled with unexpected juxtapositions and startling transfigurations, dramatize interior realities “in a dreamlike fashion, never taking a straight path from one event to another if a more beautiful route is available,” in the words of actor Natalie Portman. For the critic Hilton Als, Kennedy “is a kind of film scenarist . . . whose strongest work renders the stage more cinema-like, less intransigent, more open to different ways of moving.” This Library of America volume presents, for the first time, a collected edition of Adrienne Kennedy’s writing, spanning six decades and including five uncollected and ten previously unpublished works.

Kennedy’s early surrealistic one-acts imagine unsettling, often terrifying scenarios that confront fundamental questions of identity, history, and cultural power. In The Owl Answers, set on the New York City subway, the play’s biracial protagonist attempts to grasp who she really is while surrounded by the ghosts of prominent figures from European history. In A Lesson in Dead Language, a classroom of girls in bloodstained dresses receives Latin instruction from a human-sized white dog. One of Kennedy’s greatest plays, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, depicts a woman’s quest for self-understanding through the distorted mirror of the mostly white casts of the black-and-white films she loved as a child.

Kennedy’s later plays include bold treatments of the autobiography of Charlie Chaplin (A Lancashire Lad) and of episodes from the life of Beethoven (She Talks to Beethoven), as well as the suite of dramatic works featuring her literary alter ego, the writer Suzanne Alexander, among them Ohio State Murders, which was staged on Broadway in 2022. Sleep Deprivation Chamber is a searing indictment of racially motivated police violence based on a real-life incident involving her son Adam P. Kennedy, who cowrote the play. Also gathered in this volume are Kennedy’s adaptations of Euripides’s Electra and Orestes, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and John Lennon’s nonsense books, all brilliantly reimagined.

Like her plays, Kennedy’s fiction and her memoir, People Who Led to My Plays, have a vividness and at times an almost hallucinatory intensity. Writings from Kennedy’s later years take the measure of her rich life, as in the essay “Almost Eighty,” in which she poignantly excavates the past through a scrapbook compiled by her mother. Taken together, the work gathered in Collected Plays & Other Writings is a celebration of Kennedy’s singular achievement on stage and page alike.

Marc Robinson, editor, is Malcolm G. Chace ’56 Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and English at Yale University. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including The American Play: 1787–2000.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by Meryl Streep and an anonymous foundation.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Story of the Week “Secret Paragraphs about My Brother,” Adrienne Kennedy
September 13, 2024

News “She Knows So Much of Love”: Charting Playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s Reverence for the World around Her
October 31, 2023

Video The Startling Theater of Adrienne Kennedy
October 26, 2023

Interviews “Experimental in the Fullest Sense”: Marc Robinson on the Convention-Shattering Works of Adrienne Kennedy
September 11, 2023
Table of Contents

PLAYS
The Tiger and the Tomboy
Funnyhouse of a Negro
The Owl Answers
A Lesson in Dead Language
A Rat’s Mass
Sun
Cities in Bézique
A Beast Story
Boats
An Evening with Dead Essex
Diary of Lights: New York About 1955
A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White
Black Children’s Day
A Lancashire Lad
Film Festival: The Day Jean Seberg Died
She Talks to Beethoven
Ohio State Murders
The Film Club
Dramatic Circle
Motherhood 2000
June and Jean in Concert (Concert of Their Lives)
Sleep Deprivation Chamber (with Adam P. Kennedy)
Brontë Scenes
Hitler’s Addendum (with epilogue by Adrienne Kennedy and Adam P. Kennedy)
Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? (with Adam P. Kennedy)
He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box
Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side

ADAPTATIONS
The Lennon Play: In His Own Write (with John Lennon and Victor Spinetti)
Electra (Euripides)
Orestes (Euripides)
Madame Bovary (from Gustave Flaubert)

FICTION, MEMOIRS, AND ESSAYS
Because of the King of France
Milena’s Wedding
A Growth of Images
Preface to Adrienne Kennedy in One Act
People Who Led to My Plays
Deadly Triplets: A Theatre Mystery and Journal
Letter to My Students on My Sixty-first Birthday by Suzanne Alexander
Secret Paragraphs about My Brother
A Letter to Flowers
Grendel and Grendel’s Mother
On the Writing of Funnyhouse of a Negro
Paragraphs, Passages, and Pages That Changed My Life
Seeking a King
The Bride Vanished
Almost Eighty
On Story
Visited by a Phantom

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-751-2 1104 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 372 Library of America Series

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