72 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021
THETHEATRE
ON BOOK
The restlessly inventive plays of Adrienne Kennedy.BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM
ILLUSTRATION BY JAMIEL LAW
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, de-
pending on the subtlety of the maneu-
ver—that this character is a locomotive,
moving inexorably along the track that
is the script. One question in great dra-
mas is how an individual’s free will might
chafe against the world’s immovable fix-
tures. 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 ac-
tors 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.
I kept thinking about that awful pos-
sibility while watching “The Work of
Adrienne Kennedy: Inspiration and In-
fluence,” a digital “festival” of filmed read-
ings put on by Round House Theatre,
in association with McCarter Theatre
Center. Kennedy, who is eighty-nine, is
one of our greatest and least definable
living playwrights, restlessly inventive
and ruthlessly unshy about the pressures
exerted by history upon our lives. If one
motif hums through her work (besides
herself: she is our foremost artist of the-
atrical autobiography), it is a nagging,sometimes unbearable suspicion that the
past has hijacked the present.
Kennedy’s most famous play, the sur-
realist one-act “Funnyhouse of a Negro,”
from 1964, is a kind of dream masquer-
ade. A woman called Negro-Sarah—the
specificity of a name smashed up against
the bleak determinism of a category—
sits surrounded by a chorus of hyperver-
bal historical figures who are meant to
act as alternate “selves.” One is a Habsburg
duchess; one is the Congolese freedom
fighter Patrice Lumumba; another is Jesus.
Sarah wears a noose around her neck like
a victim-in-waiting but talks like a mem-
ber of a cosseted—if a bit bugged-out—
bourgeoisie. She’s “soulless, educated and
irreligious,” she says. “I want to possess
no moral value, particularly value as to
my being. I want not to be. I ask noth-
ing except anonymity.” Negro-Sarah
would like to use her middle-classness
as a talisman to ward off recognition and
pain. She thinks of her white friends “as
an embankment to keep me from reflect-
ing too much upon the fact that I am a
Negro.” And yet, irreversibly, that fact
breaks the embankment like a flood. Be-
cause of the color of her skin and the his-
tory it holds, Sarah—like her selves, whose
monologues are haunted by mixed par-
entage—signifies wildly, full of “moral
value” well beyond her own control.
In “Funnyhouse,” with its gruesome
contortions and mordant humor, Ken-
nedy reminds me of the conceptual art-
ist Adrian Piper, whose best gag might
be the drawing “Self Portrait Exagger-
ating My Negroid Features.” For both
artists, realism falls apart under the ab-
surdity of race and the unction of his-
tory. Between who you are and how you’re
seen lies a possibly unbridgeable gap.T
he plays that are presented in “The
Work of Adrienne Kennedy” come
from later in the playwright’s career, and
show a development in her thinking. “He
Brought Her Heart Back in a Box,” Ken-
nedy’s most recent play, first produced
in 2018, tells the story of a fraught ro-
mance between Kay (Maya Jackson), a
Black woman of mixed ancestry, and
Chris (Michael Sweeney Hammond),
the white heir to a prominent family who
rule the affairs of the Georgia town where
they both were born and raised. The har-
rowing stakes of their courtship are clear
One motif in Kennedy’s work is the suspicion that the past has hijacked the present. from the start, but Kennedy’s mode of