Understanding Adrienne Kennedy (review)

256Comparative Drama Philip C. Kolin. UnderstandingAdrienne Kennedy. Columbia S.C.: University ofSouth Carolina Press,2005. Pp.xii + 222. $34.95. Seventy titles into its Understanding Contemporary American Literature series , the University ofSouth Carolina Press is clearly fulfilling a need by giving students and "good nonacademic readers" some assistance in grappling with what series editor Matthew J. Bruccoli describes as "works that depart from the traditional forms and techniques of prose and poetry" (ix). The description certainly applies to the plays of the eminent African American dramatist Adrienne Kennedy. Adrienne Kennedy's plays eschewAristotelian narrative and literal meanings . Daunting in their imagery and provocative in their multiple signifiers, they can absorb any amount ofcritical dissection and still retain their mystery. The eight chapters of this book offer close readings of fifteen plays written between 1964 and 1996. One revelation of Philip C. Kolin's study is how much one profits by considering Kennedy's plays as an entire corpus. There is a cumulative effect created by the recurring themes.Thus,just as the past and the present often interrogate each other within Kennedy's plays, so too do aspects of her early plays jump into bolder reliefbyjuxtaposition with the later work. It is certainly fitting that both the Great Lakes Theater Festival and the Signature CompanyTheatre have each presented a season focused on her plays. The first chapter introducesAdrienne Kennedy (b. 1931),provides an overview of her writing, and describes the influences of film, music (notably Beethoven), me classics, and TennesseeWilliams on her thinking. Her childhood in Cleveland, Ohio, with visits to family in Montezuma, Georgia—an opposition between the urban north and the rural south—may partially account for the divided sensibility that permeates so many of her plays. At Ohio State University (1949-53), Kennedy encountered truly devastating racial prejudice. Fourteen months in Africa with her husband helped to restore her sense ofself and propelled her to write her first plays, which were then nurtured in a workshop by Edward Albee. Funnyhouse ofa Negro (1963), Kennedy's first produced play and still one ofherbest known, is the subject of chapter 2. Its disjointed,hallucinatory quality with multiple overlapping identities and cultures is skillfully evoked and explicated.While the autobiographical nature ofKennedy's work is emphasized throughout the book, this chapter deals with dramatic elements as expressive of a tormented psyche, and that interiorized understanding is certainly appropriate for the early plays. Not until chapter 6, with the treatment of the more literallyautobiographicalAlexanderplays,do we learn the specific circumstance Reviews257 presumably underlying Kennedy's obsession with hair and bald or bleeding heads among other such arcane leitmotifs (134). A Rat'sMass (1963) and A Lesson in DeadLanguage(1964) create horrifying , complex ritual interactions of children and animals while incorporating literaryallusions and bloodyimages. TheOwlAnswersand A BeastStory(both 1969) continue the psychic spiral of reactions to racism in counterpoint to English culture and historic London, where Kennedy lived from 1966 to 1969. A Movie StarHas to Starin Black and White (1976) is a fascinating odyssey into the cultural formation ofidentity, powerfully dramatizing the slippery nature of one's sense of self. The four Alexander plays—so called because the protagonist in each is Susan Alexander, a projection ofKennedy's own persona—are among her more accessible works and represent a maturing perspective on the interaction of selves at different stages of development. She Talks to Beethoven, The Ohio StateMurders, TheFilm Club,and Dramatic Circle,allpublished in 1992,grapple with racism even as theyintertwinewhite cultural analogies: Beethoven's Fidelio, Thomas Hardy's Tess ofthe D'Urbervilles, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Kolin groups four late plays as "political morality plays": Sun:A Poem for Malcolm XInspiredbyHisMurder(1968),An Evening with DeadEssex(1973), Sleep Deprivation Chamber (1996, with Adam P. Kennedy), and Motherhood 2000 (1994). Their political implications are clear, but Kolin does not explain his use of the term moralityplays-, there is, however, an oblique reference to medieval mystery plays at the end ofthe chapter (169-70). Similarly, the casual sprinkling of aesthetic terms like surrealistic (148) and expressionistic (149) without definition would seem contrary to the purpose of the series. In terms ofvocabulary, a fewother minor cavils mightbe noted."Kennedy's stagecraft...