The Adrienne Kennedy Reader

"She and Irene Fornes and Sam Shepherd – those charismatic off-Broadway figures – were starting out when I first beginning to worship theatre but I didn’t start writing until the 1970s. I was following her work, though, as an amateur from the 60s on. I was assembling my personal literary culture and she was crucial to it. The first encounter was with her as a playwright rather than an essayist or a fiction writer. It was Funnyhouse of a Negro and I was mesmerised by the boldness of the language and form – it fractured time and space and layered conflicting narratives. As she said, “my plays are states of mind.” It was a play as a state of mind and it explored and exploded with revelations about black women and middle-class woman who longed to be artists. They were wracked by cultural constrictions and feverish imaginations. Her observations were absolutely fresh. “I was mesmerised by the boldness of the language and form – it fractured time and space and layered conflicting narratives… It was a play as a state of mind” You know, it was not an accident that she and Sylvia Plath were working in those early 60s years. I think of them in some ways as having a lot in common, in that insistence on absolutely violating, in very determined literary form, all the expected proprieties and gentilities of a feminine sensibility. Yes, and even when the self is tragic, it is kind of a heroic self for the way that it just explodes into the world, into literature and history. These plays are absolutely filled with this. There’s Queen Elizabeth, there’s Queen Victoria, there’s Jesus, then there’s Patrice Lumumba, there’s Virgil…. There’s this fearless cultural claiming, of literary history and of racial and political history. They are not divided; it’s aesthetic, it’s historical, and it’s wildly psycho-analytically particular. One other thing: one reason the plays are so fascinating to read is that the stage directions function the way that, in another literary form, intense lyric description would. They have a kind of visual precision and emotional aura. It could be a form of poetry and that, to me, is very interesting."