Blackout: Utopian Technologies in Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro

BLACKOUT: Utopian Technologies in Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro ERIN HURLEY SCENE. In tile jungle. RED SUN. FLYING THINGS. wild black grass. The effect ofthe JUIlgle is that it, lmlike the other scenes, is over the entire stage. In time this is the long· est scene in the play and is played the slowest, as the slow, almost standstill stages ofa dream. By lighting the desired effect would be - suddenly the jungle has overgrown the chambers and all the other places with a violence and a dark brightness. a grim yellowness. - Adrienne.Kennedy (20) In the second-to-last episode of Funnyhouse oj a Negro, Adrienne Kennedy asks for the impossible. The oxymoronic effect of "a dark brightness" lies outside the realm of the technically possible. What combinations of lights, gels. and focus techniques might create "a dark brightness"? The requirement of "brightness" eliminates the possibility of "dark." This example is not the first time in her 1964 one-act that Kennedy requires the practically impossible. In her play, bald heads drop from the sky, black ravens fly around stage, walls appear out of nowhere and then characters walk through them. This is not to say that creative theatre professionals can't or won't come up with practical. elegant solutions to these staging problems. Indeed, Kennedy's impossible stage directions incite creative solutions, unique, unanticipated renderings of her imagined play in the material thealre. Nor is it to imply that the central work of theatre is to follow a playwright's stage directions as closely as possible . Creative solutions to impossible requirements include both "faithful" and "unfaithful" renderings. Rather, these impossible requirements highlight an impulse that lies at the core of theatrical representation: the impulse to substantiate or render the ideal. In the possibility that subtends that impulse is, I think, a utopic sensibility - a sense that something different or beller could come out of current conditions. As an artistic practice, theatre strives to move from (or to mark the moveModern Drama, 47:2 (Summer 2004) 200 Utopian Technologies in Adrienne Kennedy 201 ment from) immanence to incipience, from the thought to the deed, the unframed activity to the framed action - whether these unframed thoughts and activities be construed in terms of texts (e.g., the play, the scenario, the character ) or doings (e.g., happenings, or ritualized communications Witll the spirit world).' In other words, it engages fundamentally with what Herbert Blau calls "the struggle to appear," rendering image in substance (To All Appearances 157-99). However, representation is doomed to failed·appearances. In Unmarked, Peggy Phelan establishes that "[r1epresentation follows two laws: it always conveys more than it intends; and it is never totalizing" (2). In the move from immanence to incipience, something gets left behind; "what is" in the realm of appearance can never fully substantiate the idea of it. The image of "a dark brightness" will always exceed its material rendering. However, in that same move from immanence to incipience we might also glimpse something more than what was intended. If the idea is always reduced in its rendering , it is also always expanded. Though amputated in its passage from thought to act, the idea-in-substance also acquires phantom limbs - felt but unseen. Il is through these affecting and effective phantom limbs that the theatrical enterprise runs and its utopic impulse to substantiate might be sensed. This paper dwells on the basic theatrical challenge of substantiation and the utopic sensibility behind it. I propose the blackout as a signal location in which substantiation and intimations of utopia braid. I examine this material practice with particular reference to its deployment in Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro. This 1964 one-act is structured by blackouts and a series of technical, ideological, and identitary impossibilities. I argue that Kennedy's use of blackouts encourages an alternate current of perception, one that forces attention to what is sensed even when nothing is seen and to the conditions of racial and·technical substantiation. I theorize Kennedy's blackout as a space/time of possibility suspended between immanence and incipience and replete with phantom limbs that allow for unanticipated renderings of idea as substance, of impossibility...