From Adrienne Kennedy: Collected Plays & Other Writings
Adrienne Kennedy, who was born on September 13, 1931, turns 93 today.
For more than sixty years, Kennedy has been one of America’s most daring and prodigious writers for the stage. Her groundbreaking plays include her 1964 Obie Award–winning Funnyhouse of a Negro and 1991’s Ohio State Murders, belatedly staged on Broadway in 2022 with Audra McDonald in the lead role.
Kennedy wrote for more than a decade—through marriage, the birth of two children, and a stint living abroad—before her first play was produced. “I admire Tennessee Williams and Garcia Lorca,” she told an interviewer, “and I struggled for a long time to write plays—as typified by Funnyhouse—in which the person is in conflict with their inner forces, with the conflicting sides to their personality, which I found to be my own particular, greatest conflict.”
It was her attendance at the age of 14 at a performance of A Glass Menagerie that led her to a love of Williams’s plays and set her on the path to becoming a writer and then a playwright. “It took ten years to stop imitating him, to stop using his form and to stop stealing his themes, which were not mine,” Kennedy wrote in her 1987 memoir, People Who Led to My Plays.
Last year Library of America published a volume of Kennedy’s collected plays and other writings, and we featured one of her autobiographical essays on our Story of the Week website. When her brother Cornell died at the age of 37 in 1972, a decade after the car accident that left him paralyzed and brain-damaged, Kennedy realized how little she’d known about him, and she wrote about the loss in “Secret Paragraphs about My Brother.”
Read “Secret Paragraphs about My Brother,” by Adrienne Kennedy.
