God and the Owls: The Sacred and the Profane in Adrienne Kennedy's The Owl Answers

God and the Owls: The Sacred and the Profane in Adrienne Kennedy's The Owl Answers CARLA J. MCDONOUGH I thought [God} lived in the sky and looked over and protected me. -Adrienne Kennedyl Icall God and the Owl answers. - C1ara, from The Owl Answers2 Adrienne Kennedy has commented about her 1965 work The Owl Answers that it is her favorite play, even though it has been overshadowed by the 1964 work Funnyhouse ofa Negro. She has also quoted Joseph Papp as commenting that Owl is her best-written play.3 Despite Kennedy's interest in the play, and its own merits, Owl has not received as much attention as has her breakthrough play Funnyhouse, although it treats similarly provocative issues ofgender, race, and identity. Except for Robert L. Tener's discussion of it, Owl is usually treated in passing in conjunction with several of Kennedy's plays, such as Funnyhouse. A MovieSlar Has 10 Star in Black and While, Lesson in a Dead Language, A Rat's Mass, or the play with which Owl was originally coupled for performance , A Beast StOlY. The most extensive critical examinations of Owl thus far, besides Tener's, have appeared in articles by Elin Diamond, Susan E. Meigs, Rosemary Curb, and Kimberly Benston, and book chapters about Kennedy by Marc Robinson and Linda Kintz.• Most of these discussions note the mergings and fracturings of identity (or of"identification," as Diamond discusses) within the characters of this drama. While Kintz examines the effects of "the myth of purity" on Clara's subjectivity, Benston discusses Kennedy's style of theater, its use of symbolism and its "psychological mode," especially in regard to its effects on the audience.s For those readers/viewers already familiar with Funnyhouse, it is immediately clear when examining The Owl Answers that it explores some of the same terrain in that the main character, a young woman, is tom between conflicting desires for acceptance in the white world and her mixedModern Drama, 40 (1997) 385 CARLA 1. MCDONOUGH racial heritage. Curb sums up the duality of the fragmented identity that torments Clara in Owl as being that between the Virgin Mary self and the Owl self, where the owl represents "her black, African, Negro side and her evil, sensual, bestial female side.". None of these quite useful articles, however, offers a sustained analysis of the play in and of itself. Critically, the play has remained overshadowed by the more well-known Funllyhouse ofa Negro. Although there are striking similarities between The Owl Answers and Funnyhouse ofa Negro, Owl explores territory different from Funnyhouse in its examination of religion, represented by Catholicism, and its effect on the psyche of Kennedy's female characters. The references to St. Peter's Basilica and St. Paul's Chapel, and the play's use ofthe cult of the Virgin Mary, which the Bastard's Black Mother is obsessed with, emphasize the way that religious issues permeate this play. While FUlillyhouse chiefly examines political colonialism and the issue of mixed-race heritage caught in its ideology, with only a few nods to how issues ofreligion are implicated in this ideology for the female characters, Owl examines female sexuality in regard to religious ideology and issues of mixed race heritage, which gives a nod to colonialism in its references to the English heritage of its characters.' Thus these plays should serve as complementary visions (rather than repetitions ) of the intersections of gender and race within political and religious ideology . Put another way, The Owl Answers, while treating similar racial issues of identity to those treated in Funnyhouse, concentrates more fully on how religion affects one's self-conception. I use the term "conception" here to reflect the double meaning of conceiving an idea and conceiving as in giving birth because in Kennedy's theatrical world, thinking and being, thought and life are intricately intermingled. How one is conceived (biologically) affects how one is conceived of by others and by oneself. Therefore, within this world, one's parentage, one's inheritance (cultural or biological), shapes one's psyche. Thus The Owl Answers reflects Kennedy's adeptness at exploring the liminality of ideological existence and the many influences that shape...