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Reviewed by:
  • Understanding Adrienne Kennedy
  • Erin Hurley
Philip C. Kolin . Understanding Adrienne Kennedy. Understanding Contemporary American Literature Series. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. 222. $34.95 (Hb).

Philip C. Kolin's Understanding Adrienne Kennedy introduces the playwright to a readership of "students as well as good non-academic readers" in order to "prepare [them] for more profitable literary experiences" (ix). Adrienne Kennedy is, perhaps, the richest and yet most resistant subject for this Understanding Contemporary American Literature series from the University of South Carolina Press. On the one hand, Kennedy is particularly suited to a series whose book titles, "Understanding [X]," seem to promise understanding both the author (Understanding Adrienne Kennedy) and her oeuvre (Understanding "Adrienne Kennedy") in a reciprocally illuminating reading strategy. Autobiography subtends [End Page 111] Kennedy's plays, which, in turn, thematize autobiography; moreover, Kennedy has been forthcoming about her personal history's complicated impact on her artistic development and interests. On the other hand, efforts at explicating Kennedy's oeuvre will always be rebuffed to a substantial degree by the plays' self-reflexive distortions as well as by the doubt they cast on the very notions of "source" and "meaning." A fundamental elusiveness and refusal of full interpretation are hallmarks of Kennedy's formally and thematically challenging work and have become the starting point for the critical literature that engages it. In the spirit of this series, however, autobiography provides Kolin with a privileged point of access into Kennedy's symbolic universe. He charts the plays' sources and Kennedy's personal and artistic influences, relying on her unconventional autobiography, People Who Led to my Plays, her biographically informed novel, Deadly Triplets, and numerous interviews she accorded over her forty-year career.

Kennedy has proved particularly resistant to single-angle analyses - be they autobiographical, sociological, or symbolic - which presents a particular challenge for a single author writing a much-needed introductory monograph on Kennedy. For his part, Kolin tries to encompass this necessary critical multivocality by incorporating a wide range of scholarly and journalistic sources. His synthesis is laudable and imparts a sense of the lively discussions Kennedy has fostered in the theatre, the press, and the academy. Furthermore, his citations provide an excellent bibliography of critical engagements with Kennedy from which students, especially, will undoubtedly benefit. At times, however, Kolin's citational practice has the effect of unmooring his interlocutors from their interpretive and historical contexts, thereby undermining the critical potential of such poly-vocality. For instance, he quotes Elin Diamond's description of Funnyhouse of a Negro's Sarah and The Owl Answers' Clara as "afflicted with Gertrude Stein['s] nervousness" (50). This allusion in Diamond to the temporal disjointedness of other "nervous moderns" reads as a red herring in Kolin. More troubling, however, is how Kolin's quoting protocol here runs exactly counter to Diamond's argument in the article from which the quotation is pulled. Diamond's characterization of Sarah and Clara functions as a negative example of a form of criticism that harmonizes Kennedy's surreal plays via thematic readings insufficiently attentive to the plays' multiple addresses. Kolin seems to have unwittingly cast himself in that harmonizing critical role at a moment when he might instead have introduced the ideological diversity of Kennedy criticism to his lay readers, a diversity that may say as much about her "greatness" as does the richness of her poetic images.

As befits an introduction to a major figure, Kolin's book endeavours to describe and open up Kennedy's dramatic universe. The introduction [End Page 112] outlines the key features of Kennedy's work - character types, themes, imagery - through brief reference to the plays themselves and by comparison with playwrights and dramatic movements, like Tennessee Williams and the Black Arts Movement, that are likely to be better known to a general readership. The following seven chapters take Kennedy's plays in chronological order, with full chapters devoted to Funnyhouse of a Negro, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, and June and Jean in Concert. Kolin offers informed literary analyses whose main reference points outside of Kennedy's biography are other dramatic works (Shakespeare and Williams figure prominently) and...

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