Understanding Adrienne Kennedy (review)

Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sicknesses, and the inhumanity of Europe grew to appalling dimensions.

—Frantz Fanon (1960)

The ubiquitous monster of American racism and violence (Fanon referred to Washington, DC, as the lynching capital of the world) has haunted Adrienne Kennedy's imagination since childhood. By the time she graduated from Ohio State University in 1953, having been denied a degree in English—black students were forbidden to form clubs or to major in English—resistance to neocolonialism was in full swing in Europe and Africa (15).

After an extended trip to West Africa in the early '60s, a radicalized Kennedy discovered her voice as a playwright through the practice of recording her dreams, and began to dramatize the distorted signifiers of her divided ancestry (31). It is significant that militants such as Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, and Malcolm X populate Kennedy's plays. Their hallucinatory presence alongside white cultural and historical icons—Beethoven, Bette Davis, Freud, Napoleon, a yellow dwarfed Jesus—puts into relief the degree to which the unconscious is a social and cultural phenomenon. As characters in her plays, they also recall what Harry Elam has termed "the 'ambivalence' inherent in the colonial project of mimicry itself" (Elam 2001:289). Since Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), Kennedy's political horror plays have continued to brilliantly expose the nightmares of history, and their devastating effects on the psychic life of black women in particular.

Over the course of Understanding Adrienne Kennedy's eight chapters, Philip Kolin offers a detailed overview of Kennedy's life and career, as well as descriptions and close readings of her plays, smartly clustering his chapters by theme rather than chronology. His main methodological approach to Kennedy's work is biographical: "Understanding her plays requires an understanding of her family and ethnic background, politics, and nightmares" (xii). Kolin's first chapter focuses on the richly contradictory sources of Kennedy's phantasmatic characters and apocalyptic settings: the family album from Kennedy's childhood, a scrapbook of her personal and cultural relatives including such family members as her wealthy white maternal grandfather, and revered artists and movie stars such as Louis Armstrong, Van Gogh, James Baldwin, and Elizabeth Taylor. Her parents' passionate interest in the affairs of the NAACP, as well as their love of Hollywood movies stars, all combined in Kennedy's early imagination to stage the already complex battle of identities that permeate her plays.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 address Kennedy's composite characters—animal selves dehumanized by white theology—in The Owl Answers, A Beast's Story, A Rat's Mass, and A Lesson in a Dead Language. In The Owl Answers, "Clara is a young black teacher who is the Virgin Mary who is the Bastard who is the Owl all at the same time" (19). As Kolin later points out, quoting Jeannie Forte, She/Clara "traverses narrative, zigzagging across various systems of signification […] wherein her persistently elusive subjectivity might be found" (57). And as Kolin sums up A Rat's Mass: "Black is evil. Historically, rats, brown and black, were thought to carry disease, a point the Nazis made when they metamorphosed the Jews, their racial enemies, into swarming rats in Joseph Goebbel's fascist propaganda of the 1930s" (82).

Kolin devotes chapter 5 to a nuanced analysis of A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White. Here, the "real" people from Kennedy's life and family move into the impossible real of theatrical representation. The ubiquitous Clara and members of her family speak through and with female movie stars from the '40s and '50s. However, rather than speaking lines from specific movies, they instead "star" in the bit parts of their own lives. Kolin explores the ways in which self-representation becomes a traumatic process of imitation and self-erasure, through borrowing the "sanitized spectacle" of Hollywood aesthetics and wryly concludes, "spectatorship...