BIBR spotlight: saluting an innovative dramatist: ahead of her time, playwright Adrienne Kennedy paved the way for Ntozake Shange, George C. Wolfe and the rest.

When the play Funnyhouse of a Negro opened off-Broadway in 1964, reaction was swift and vitriolic. One New York critic called the play "a disaster, not even worthy of consideration." The play went on to win an Obie Award. Today, the playwright Adrienne Kennedy says gently, "I still haven't gotten over it."

Forty years of awards and recognition, fellowships, grants, prizes, honorary degrees and, now in September 2003, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Foundation, still haven't dimmed the memory of that initial reaction to a play that would alter the face of American dramatic arts. Kennedy reckons that 70 percent of the theatergoing public at the time hated Funnyhouse. "And I was torn apart by the people who hated it. They didn't like Sarah (the lead character in the play). They thought she was a disgraceful character, and they didn't like me. They thought I was just like Sarah."

While it's highly unlikely that anybody today would hold that view of the 72-year-old Kennedy, it is extremely likely that the uninitiated would still find her work challenging, to say the least. Kennedy's plays are not linear, her characters neither conventional nor predictable. There are no plots to speak of, though there's always something interesting going on. Kennedy's plays are not black, at least not in the way we've come to expect to see our black selves represented on stage, for Kennedy explores the European influence on the black American experience, as well as the African influence. For example, the aforementioned Sarah in Funnyhouse of a Negro is really four aspects of the same self in one Negro female character: the Duchess of Hapsburg, Queen Victoria, Patrice Lumumba and Jesus Christ. "The word 'pretentious' was used a lot," says Kennedy, recalling the negative reaction to the play. "I thought Funnyhouse was a total failure. I was despondent."

A handful of artists, academics and journalists, however, thought Funnyhouse and its creator brilliant; and the following year, The Owl Answers was produced, continuing Kennedy's bold, iconoclastic experiment with the dramatic form. The play's stage directions instruct that "the characters change slowly back and forth into and out of themselves," and that the scene "is a New York subway is the Tower of London is a Harlem hotel room is St. Peter's."

"She Who is Clara Passmore Who is the Virgin Mary Who is the Bastard Who is the Owl" is the lead character. She shares the stage with Anne Boleyn, Shakespeare, Chaucer, William the Conqueror, Negro Man, and Goddam Father Who is the Richest White Man in the Town, and Clara may be Black or white or both.

The next year, 1966, A Rat's Mass established Kennedy as a major--and permanent--player in American dramatic arts, though she still had no sense of herself and her work as seminal. Yet her work helped establish off-Broadway experimental theater as an essential component of American theater, and paved the way for such daring and unconventional work as Ntozake Shange's for colored Girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf and George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum.

In the beginning, Kennedy was out there on the point, alone, and it was an unpleasant experience. "Luckily, I got a Guggenheim and I went to live in England for almost three years." She's also received three Obie Awards, two Rockefeller grants, the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is one of only five American playwrights included in the Norton Anthology of American Literature. She has lived in Africa and Europe, and has taught at universities across this country.

Yet Kennedy's numerous plays still aren't widely produced because they're considered too short and too challenging for theater audiences, though they are taught in dramatic studies programs in American and European universities. Kennedy's plays resonate with disturbing, shocking imagery and language, reflecting her own fragmented experience.

Born in Pittsburgh ha 1931, Kennedy grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. Her parents, educated professionals, were Southerners, and young Adrienne and her brother spent summers with relatives in Montezuma, Georgia. The transition from integrated school rooms to the harshly segregated South, by train on the Jim Crow car, was life altering.

"I was fragmented, confused. What was my place in the world, a young black woman? I definitely brought that to Sarah in Funnyhouse and Clara in Owl Answers. They don't know what direction to take." It is that ambivalence Vr that sparked early criticism of Kennedy's work t because black dramatic personae weren't supposed to be confused about their blackness, especially in the 1960s. Kennedy says she was too concerned with perfecting her craft to worry about the criticism. "There was something missing from my writing and I couldn't understand what it was. I was trying very hard to write these very realistic plays, and I would get so discouraged."

She also was plagued by horrific, violent dreams. She found relief for both problems the way many artists do: through the work of other artists. For Kennedy, those artists were painters Jackson Pollock and Pablo Picasso, and poet Federico Garcia Lorca. They opened Kennedy to the possibilities of nonlinear structure, and to the artistic and constructive use of thematic violence. As a result, Kennedy's characters display not ambiguity about their blackness, but about how to mitigate the violence of racism within the context of both the African and the European cultural and artistic influences.

That 40-year quest is what earned her the 2003 Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, the only juried American literary competition recognizing work that explores the effects of racism and cultural diversity on society. Kennedy, who lives in New York City, is remarkably frank and open in sharing her reminiscences, and in expressing her gratitude to "a small group of intense, passionate people" who have accepted, respected and honored her work over the years. She admits to being a fragile personality and that her work and her children, sons Joseph and Adam, "saved my life." She also admits that an honorary degree from Ohio State University in June on the 50th anniversary of her graduation and the Anisfield-Wolf Award this fall, all bring her special joy.

"It's beyond my wildest expectations," Kennedy says. "It makes me feel that I've done something worthwhile."

FOR FURTHER READING:

The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, introduction by Werner Sollors, University of Minnesota Press August 2001, $18.95, ISBN 0-816-63603-6

People Who Led to My Plays by Adrienne Kennedy, Theatre Communications Group, September 1996 $14.96, ISBN 1-559-36125-5

--Penny Mickelbury is a novelist and playwright who lives in Los Angeles, California.