The American Century: Literature since 1945 665music may be used. What she creates is a mosaic woven around figures whose sense
of identity seems to be floating, fluid, permeable. In her first professionally produced
play, Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), for instance, she deployed her experience as an
African-American female, her travels in Europe, and her knowledge of the classics to
dramatize the ambiguities of a people, like her own, created out of the clash between
European and American cultures. In The Owl Answers (1965), her personal favorite
among her plays, she touches on the quest for identity of a black woman in a world
dominated by whites, using composite characters who transform back and forth
into different parts of themselves. In A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White
(1976) she maps out overlapping dramatic spaces, of family scene and movie scene,
as she describes the dilemma of her central character, caught between daylight and
dream, her role as a wife and mother and her being as a writer. Kennedy’s many
other plays include Son: A Poem for Malcolm X Inspired by His Murder (1968), An
Evening With Dead Essex (1973), The Alexander Plays (1992), and (with her son
Adam) Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? (2008). Mixing influences as different
as Wagner, Tennessee Williams, and James Baldwin, characters out of myth and
movies, fantasy and history, autobiography and theology, all of them are marked by
an intense concern with issues of identification and attachment. “There was always
great confusion in my own mind where I belonged, if anywhere,” Kennedy has
admitted; and she has turned that confusion into complex drama.
Both Ed Bullins (1935–) and August Wilson (1945–2005) are also seminal figures
in the story of African-American drama since the war. Bullins was brought up in a
tough Philadelphia neighborhood and knows the violence of the ghetto at firsthand:
he was nearly stabbed to death as a youth. The gritty existence his characters lead,
in a street world that Bullins describes as “natural” rather than naturalistic, reflects
the influence of that environment. After a spell in the navy, and traveling around
America, he settled in San Francisco. There he joined other African-American
writers to form Black Arts West, a militant cultural and political organization, and
to direct the Black House Theatre. Other writers committed, like him, to drama as
an agent of cultural and political change included Ben Caldwell (1937–), whose
best-known play is Prayer Meeting (1967), and Ron Milner (1938–2004), whose
most influential play was What the Wine-Sellers Buy (1974). The writer who
influenced him most, however, was Amiri Baraka. In his play Dutchman, in particular,
Baraka had used elements of myth, mixing absurdist conventions and realistic
strategies with a brittle colloquialism, to tell a fast-paced tale of a fatal encounter
between a provocative white woman and a naive, middle-class black man. The
woman, called Lula, turns from flirtation to taunts, as she attacks the black man,
Clay, for playing the role which the dominant white society has handed him. Clay
finally replies with all the force of racial hatred that he has repressed in order to
survive, claiming that for a black man repression and conformity are necessary
because murder is the only alternative. Furious at losing control of the situation,
Lula fatally stabs Clay. She then orders the other riders on the subway train where
she and Clay have met and where all the action occurs to remove his body. As they
are doing so, the play ends with another black man entering the subway car and LulaGGray_c05.indd 665ray_c 05 .indd 665 8 8/1/2011 7:31:37 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 37 PM