"This Fundamental Challenge to Identity": Reproduction and Representation in the Drama of Adrienne Kennedy

Pregnancy seems to be experienced as the radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject: redoubling up of the body, separation and coexistence of the self and an other, of nature and consciousness, of physiology and speech. This fundamental challenge to identity is then accompanied by a fantasy of totality—narcissistic completeness—a sort of instituted, socialized, natural psychosis.

—Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time” ¹

Shrouded in mystery, Adrienne Kennedy’s poetic dramas present terrifying visualizations of tormented psyches. Their heroines are split personalities whose alter-egos and alternative “selves” coexist on stage. “My plays are meant to be states of mind,” says the playwright, and Ruby Cohn agrees: “Her plays are acts of mind—tremulous or masterful, but always highly eloquent.” ²

Although Kennedy’s plays focus on the mind, their subtexts are riddled with references to the body and the reproductive process. Kennedy’s plays may be seen as expressions of failed pregnancies—of pregnancies that end in miscarriage and madness. Due to ingrained racial and sexual oppression, Kennedy’s subjects remain fragmented, existing as bitterly opposed selves, observing their own existence but unable to act, incapacitated by circumstances of birth. While Kennedy’s plays sustain thematic metaphors of miscarriage, however, they also work as symbols of birth, fulfilling Elin Diamond’s definition of “mimesis-mimicry” and thereby satisfying a theatrical metaphor for the womb. ³

Clara, the main character of A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, posits at the beginning of that play, “Each day I wonder with what or with whom can I coexist in a true union?” ⁴ Clara’s concern conceivably could be voiced by any of Kennedy’s characters; the question of such a union has permeated the playwright’s dramas for thirty years. Yet a certain irony underlies this question even in its asking, for each of Kennedy’s protagonists does coexist with a vast array of characters, each a part of herself. Each is fragmented, both physically and thematically; each dramatically portrayed as a series of selves who speak, act, and exist independently of one another. Sarah, the “Negro” of Funnyhouse of a Negro, literally faces her unlikely combination of four alter egos, listed in the cast of characters as “herselves”: the Duchess of Hapsburg, Queen Victoria Regina, Jesus, and Patrice Lumumba. A Movie Star’s Clara watches her life as if it were a film and casts herself in the roles of Bette Davis, Jean Peters, and Shelley Winters, all of whom are integrated into her character through their monologues. In The Owl Answers, characters flow so quickly from one to the next that even their names reflect that fluidity: She who is Clara Passmore who is the Virgin Mary who is the Bastard who is the Owl; Bastard’s Black Mother who is the Reverend’s Wife who is Anne Boleyn. In Kennedy’s latest plays, the selves are torn less violently, with less polarization; still, memory takes its toll on Suzanne Alexander in The Ohio State Murders, fragmenting her into two distinct selves—one older, one young. However, these selves who coexist within their protagonists’ minds never achieve the sort of union to which Clara aspires; instead, they negate it, further fragmenting their victims by debilitating their capacities for any nourishing union.

Men and women experience time differently—the one in terms of production, the other in terms of reproduction; this first point of Julia Kristeva’s from “Women’s Time” is readily applicable to Kennedy’s plays, which are cyclical in their incantatory repetitions. Sue-Ellen Case provides a similar interpretation when she suggests: “A female form might embody her sexual mode, aligned with multiple orgasms, with no dramatic focus on ejaculation or necessity to build to a single climax. The contiguous organization would replace this ejaculatory form.” ⁵ Case uses Kennedy as the obvious example, and both Case and Diamond question the capacity of traditional mimetic drama to express such themes and forms—a point I will discuss below. “Women’s Time,” however, relates to Kennedy’s writing on a more subtle...