“I’m honored and humbled to be part of Adrienne Kennedy’s long-overdue Broadway debut in the newly dedicated James Earl Jones Theatre with Kenny Leon,” McDonald said. “This timeless play has a powerful resonance and relevance today, and we can’t wait to share it with the world.”
It is an indictment of our theater that a playwright who has inspired artists across generations is so little known to the average theatergoer. Sadly, Adrienne Kennedy, the 89-year-old African American dramatic poet, whose 1964 play “Funnyhouse of a Negro” is a touchstone of 20th century American drama, is more revered than she is produced.
Her name provokes rapturous tributes from other writers. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, one of the most talented dramatists to have emerged in the last 10 years, acknowledges the debt he and his contemporaries owe: “Every playwright writing today writes in Adrienne Kennedy’s shadow, full stop.” Years of teaching her plays has shown me how her work quickens the sensibilities of young artists.
Save this story for later.
A weird thing happens when you watch an actor look down at a sheet of paper and read her lines. Suddenly, you’re aware painfully or pleasantly, depending on the subtlety of the maneuver that this character is a locomotive, moving inexorably along the track that is the script. One question in great dramas is how an individual’s free will might chafe against the world’s immovable fixtures. The actor’s eye on the page offers a slightly dark answer: maybe our liberty is an illusion, and our lives, like a play or a piece of music, are churning toward an inevitable destination. The slang for actors who haven’t yet learned all their lines is that they’re still “on book.” Perhaps that applies to all of us, just reading aloud and ambling toward our marks with some dim awareness of an ending.
Online festival highlights the powerful plays of undersung dramatist Adrienne Kennedy
Peter Marks, The Washington Post
Dec. 17, 2020
FacebookTwitterEmail
1of6Billie Krishawn, left, and Heather Gibson in Ohio State Murders. Round House TheatreShow MoreShow Less
3of6
4of6Kim Bey, left, and Deimoni Brewington in Sleep Deprivation Chamber. Round House TheatreShow MoreShow Less
5of6Rex Daugherty and Billie Krishawn in Kennedy s Ohio State Murders. Round House TheatreShow MoreShow Less
6of6
The final words of the play, uttered by a woman who has suffered unspeakable horror, struck me so powerfully that I had to replay them on my laptop several times. And that, she says, is the main source of the violent imagery in my work.