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Throughout
her writing career, Adrienne Kennedy has used her own life
experiences as symbolic of the divisiveness of American race
relations. Like Kennedy, the characters in her plays are often
light-skinned black women torn between their blackness and
whiteness.
Adrienne
Hawkins was born in 1930 to Georgia-born parents who instilled
in her a pride in black accomplishment. Her father, Cornell
W. Hawkins, attended Morehouse College and served as executive
director of the Cedar Branch of the Cleveland YMCA and on
the city's race relations staff. Her mother, Etta Hawkins,
was a graduate of Atlanta University and a teacher. Her parents
and their friends-teachers, social and civic workers, doctors,
and lawyers-were members
of the NAACP and the Urban League, she notes
in her 1987 memoir, People Who Led to My
Plays. But Kennedy was aware from an early age that she
also had white relatives whose ancestors had come from England,
and she created alter egos who sought artistic and cultural
fathers among the likes of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and William
the Conqueror.
Raised
in the then interracial, middle-class Cleveland neighborhoods
of Mt. Pleasant and Glenville, Kennedy found herself confronting
prejudice for the first time at Ohio State University. “The
immensity, the dark, rainy winters, the often open racial
hatred of the girls
in the dorm continued to demoralize me,” she would later
write. She left college a person who “had lost my equilibrium”
and spent the next decade struggling to find her own voice.
Influences as diverse as Federico Garcia Lorca's symbolic
plays, the cadences of the psalms, the poetry of jazz, French
surrealist movies, Picasso's Guernica, Jackson Pollock's
abstract paintings,
and African masks liberated her from the confines of realism
and paved the way for her distinctive lyrical, non-linear
and dreamlike style.
It
was on “a miraculous trip” to West Africa that Kennedy
“discovered a strength in being a black person.”
Returning to live in New York, she joined Edward Albee's Playwrighting
Workshop. Encouraged by Albee to let her “guts out on
stage,” she wrote her first play, Funnyhouse of a
Negro (1964), which won an Obie. The decade that followed
unleashed a torrent of dense surrealist plays that found a
place in experimental theaters such as La Mama and the Open
Theater, as well as the Public Theater of the New York Shakespeare
Festival.
But
Kennedy soon found herself in a kind of no man's land as a
black writer. As Billie Allen, who created the role of “Negro
Sarah” in Funnyhouse, later noted, some black
audiences were offended by Kennedy's portrayal of black “secrets”
on stage. “Hair, for example, had not been dealt with
in the theater.” Her unabashed, though ambivalent love
of things English and Hollywood presented difficulties for
other critics.
Except
for Joseph Chaikin's 1976 production of her play A Movie
Star Has to Star in Black and White, the '70s saw no new
work by Kennedy, who spent most of the decade as a visiting
professor at several distinguished universities. But in the
'80s a new flurry of writing yielded Deadly Triplets: A
Theatre Mystery and Journal (1990), her memoir, and a
cluster of new plays involving a character named Susan Alexander.
One of these, Ohio State Murders, was commissioned
by the Cleveland-based Great Lakes Theater Festival, of which
Gerald Freedman was then producing director.
Ruby
Dee, Gerald Freedman, and the playwright at a rehearsal
of Ohio
State Murders |
Alexander,
a successful African-American writer (played in the 1992 Great
Lakes production by Ruby Dee), has been asked to return to
her alma mater to discuss the sources of violent imagery in
her works. Spiraling back in a dreamlike journey through time,
she relives the unspeakable prejudices that violated her student
years in the early 1950s. As the literal murders of the play's
title are disclosed in the form of a mystery story, the spiritual
murders that feed the secret wellspring of Alexander's pain
are also uncovered.
Circling
closer and closer to the painful core of her story, Suzanne
creates a bond of emotional intimacy between character and
audience that compels our identification with her. Yet the
play's references to bloody revolution in the Eisenstein movie
The Battleship Potemkin and to the dissolution of King
Arthur's Round Table point beyond Suzanne's personal pain
to the ways in which society has betrayed her and so many
others like her. It is against this backdrop that we as “guilty
bystanders” are left to locate our own culpability.
In
2000, Ohio State Murders was given a new production
at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University. In
his insightful introduction to The Adrienne Kennedy Reader,
published the following year, Werner Sollors, a professor
of English and Afro-American Studies at Harvard, called Kennedy
“the quintessential modern voice on the American stage.”
This long-overdue anthology made accessible to the general
reading public, for the first time, the texts of Kennedy's
finest stage works-as well as a series of previously unpublished
prose pieces including “Letter to My Students on My Sixty-first
Birthday by Suzanne Alexander.”
A
response to the arrest and beating of Kennedy's son by a white
police officer in 1991 while she was working on Ohio State
Murders (the made-up charges were eventually dropped and
Adam Kennedy won a civil lawsuit), “Lette” finds
the playwright's fictional alter-ego recalling how she once
watched her son, the victim of a similar arrest and beating,
perform the role of Hamlet. She remembers how she wept at
the words the ghost speaks to the bewildered prince: “I
am thy father's spirit/doomed for a certain time to walk the
night/And for the day confined to fast in fires/Till the foul
crimes done in my days of nature/Are burnt and purged away.”
text
by
Margaret Lynch
Fall 2002
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(The
NEGRO stands by the wall and throughout her following
speech, the following characters come through
the wall, disappearing off into varying directions
in the darkened night of the Stage: DUCHESS, QUEEN
VICTORIA, JESUS, PATRICE LUMUMBA. JESUS is a hunchback,
yellow-skinned dwarf, dressed in white rags and
sandals. PATRICE LUMUMBA is a black man. His head
appears to be split in two with blood and tissue
in the eyes. He carries an ebony mask.)
SARAH
(NEGRO). The rooms are my rooms; a Hapsburg chamber,
a chamber in a Victorian castle, the hotel where
I killed my father, the jungle. These are the
places myselves [sic] exist in. I know no places.
That is,m I cannot believe in places. To believe
in places is to know hope and to know the emotion
of hope is to know beauty. It links us across
a horizon and connects us to the world. I find
there are no places only my funnyhouse. Streets
are rooms, cities are rooms, eternal rooms. I
try to create a space for myselves in cities,
New York, the midwest, a southern town, but it
becomes a lie. I try to give myselves a logical
relationship but that too is a lie. For relationships
[sic] was one of my last religions. I clung loyally
to the lie of relationships, again and again seeking
to establish a connection between my characters.
Jesus is Victoria's son. Mother loved my father
before her hair fell out. A loving relationship
exists between myself and Queen Victoria, a love
between myself and Jesus but they are lies.
(Then to the Right front of the Stage comes
the WHITE LIGHT. It goes to a suspended stairway.
At the foot of it, stands the LANDLADY. She is
a tall, thin, white woman dressed is a black and
red hat and appears to be talking to someone in
a suggested open doorway in a corridor of a rooming
house. She laughs like a mad character in a funnyhouse
throughout her speech.)
LANDLADY. (Who is looking up the stairway.)
Ever since her father hung himself in a Harlem
hotel when Patrice Lumumba was murdered she hides
herself in her room. Each night she repeats: He
keeps returning. How dare he enter the castle
walls, he who is the darkest of them all, the
darkest one? My mother looked like a white woman,
hair as straight as any white woman's. And I am
yellow but he, he is black, the blackest one of
them all. I hoped he was dead. Yet he still comes
through the jungle.
I tell her: Sarah, honey, the man hung himself.
Its not your blame. But, no, she stares at me:
No, Mrs. Conrad, he did not hang himself, that
is only the way they understand it, they do, but
the truth is that I bludgeoned his head with an
ebony skull that he carries [sic] about
with him. Wherever he goes, he carries [sic]
black masks and heads.
She's
suffering so till her hair has fallen out. But
then she did always hide herself in that room
with the walls of books and her statue. I always
did know she thought she was somebody else, A
Queen or something, somebody else.
BLACKOUT.
- Funnyhouse of a Negro, in The Adrienne
Kennedy Reader (University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis-London, 2001)
SUZANNE (Present): I remember how I had grown
to dread the blocks bound by the stadium, the
High Street, the vast, modern, ugly buildings
behind the Oval, then dark old Union that was
abandoned by all except the Negro students. And
too, we were spied upon by the headmistress. She
made no secret of the fact that she examined our
belongings. "That's our general practice," she
said.
Bunny
and her friends bragged often to the maids that
Iris and I had nothing in common with them, that
there was nothing to talk about with us. I felt
such danger from them. Had they somehow sought
out me and my babies? Of course I told no one
this. But I knew whites had killed Negroes, although
I had not witnessed it. Thoughts of secret white
groups murdering singed the edge of my mind.
I was often so tense that I wound them plastic
pink curlers in my hair so tightly that my head
bled. When I went to the university health center
the white intern tried to examine my head and
at the same time not touch my scalp or hair.
"You're
probably putting curlers in your hair too tightly,"
he said, looking away. Now I remembered my father's
sermons on lynching and the photographic exhibitions
we often had in our church of Negroes hanging
from trees. Then I met David. He would come by
and say hello to Mrs. Tyler. When he discovered
Carol was my child he made every effort to talk
to me. He sensed my sorrow. When he found out
that Cathi had been tragically killed he started
to come by every evening after he left the law
library. He asked no questions but only treated
me with such great tenderness. Finally I told
him everything. My pregnancy, my expulsion, the
murderer, and how I had returned to Columbus to
see if I could find the murderer of my daughter.
-Ohio
State Murders, in The Adrienne Kennedy
Reader (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis-London,
2001)
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