Sleep Deprivation Chamber (review)

During 1995–96, the Signature Theatre Company, which dedicates each season to a single playwright’s work, for the first time focused on the plays of an African American woman playwright, Adrienne Kennedy. Kennedy’s seven plays produced for the Signature’s season included two world premieres, June and Jean in Concert and Sleep Deprivation Chamber, which eventually shared an Obie Award for best play. It is the latter work, however, that is strikingly unique in the author’s body of work. In Sleep Deprivation Chamber, Kennedy for the first time shares authorship (her collaborator is her son, Adam Kennedy), and atypically the play’s inspiration is not drawn from the period between 1936 and 1961—a rich source of inspiration for her earlier plays. Furthermore, Sleep Deprivation Chamber builds to an extended realistic sequence in the form of a less than satisfying courtroom trial, an approach rarely found in Kennedy’s previous writings.

Figure 1.

Teddy Alexander (Kevin T. Carroll) and Suzanne Alexander (Trazana Beverley) in the Signature Theatre Company’s production of Adrienne Kennedy and Adam Kennedy’s Sleep Deprivation Chamber, directed by Michael Kahn, at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, New York. Photo: Susan Johann.

Sleep Deprivation Chamber, whose action resonates with the Rodney King case, is the fictionalized account of Adam Kennedy’s arrest and beating by a white police officer in the driveway of his father’s Arlington, Virginia, home in 1991. Adam had been signaled by the police to stop several blocks from his home for a faulty taillight. By continuing to drive until he reached his father’s property, Adam found himself charged with resisting arrest and assaulting an officer. Through the characters of Teddy Alexander and his mother Suzanne, an author, the Kennedys write themselves into the play’s thinly veiled mother-son relationship and unfolding action; both the Kennedys and the Alexanders face the trauma of police brutality and the helplessness and uncertainty of the struggles fostered by a deeply flawed legal system. This—and more—is written into the alternatingly fantastic and realistic landscapes of Sleep Deprivation Chamber, set in a racist America that repeatedly prompts African-Americans to ask: “What have I done? What’s the charge?” As revealed in monologues based upon her passionate letters to government officials about her son’s case, Suzanne is exhausted and suffocating from her efforts to “fit into America.”

Through the act of putting pen to paper, however, Suzanne hopes to write her way to the truth, despite the different versions of the story of her son’s arrest that circulate. Teddy, Adam’s alter ego (powerfully played by Kevin T. Carroll), has his version of the events that are captured in the play’s realistic moments; Teddy’s father (Willie C. Carpenter) grippingly offers his perspective in tense monologues that are contested as they fluctuate between fact and conjecture; and the arresting officer, Holzer (played with cocky assuredness by Jonathan Fried) gets his chance to narrate from the witness stand. In her autobiography, Kennedy has written that “contradictory voices” are essential to “penetrating to the truth of things” (People Who Led to My Plays [New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988], 86). For her own part in coming to terms with this nightmare, Adrienne Kennedy’s strategy is finally to reengage art—to write a play—where she has the freedom to return to the life of the imagination in order to begin to unravel life’s increasingly daunting, sinister realities.

As shaped by veteran Kennedy director Michael Kahn, Sleep Deprivation Chamber moves fluidly from the realistic scenes of Teddy’s dealings with the police on the night of the arrest and his meetings with lawyers, to expressionist and surrealist scenes, often of Suzanne’s nightmares involving her children: these range from Teddy’s confinement to Yorick’s gravesite (he is shown early in the play rehearsing Hamlet with classmates at Antioch College) to her daughter, Patrice, standing naked on the Stanford campus. Images...