Library of America #372

Adrienne Kennedy has been a force on the American stage since the premiere of her groundbreaking, Obie Award-winning Funnyhouse of a Negro in 1964. Politically engaged, formally daring, and making provocative use of material from contemporary history and popular culture, Kennedy's haunting stage works dramatize and project interior realities that are often marked by disappointment and trauma, madness and terror. Her understanding of the inner lives of African American women expresses a powerfully insightful feminism that has come to influence generations of playwrights and writers. Now, the Library of America presents, for the first time, a collected edition of Kennedy's extraordinary and wide-ranging writings, spanning six decades and including ten unpublished works. Here are the early surrealistic one-acts A Lesson in Dead Language and A Rat's Mass; works like A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White and Film Festival: The Day Jean Seberg Died that reveal Kennedy's longstanding fascination with Hollywood and film culture; and Ohio State Murders, one of several plays featuring her protagonist Suzanne Alexander and the first of her plays to be staged--belatedly, in 2022--on Broadway. Sleep Deprivation Chamber is a searing indictment of racially motivated police violence based on real-life incidents involving her son, who co-wrote the play. Also included here are Kennedy's adaptations of works by Euripides, Flaubert, and John Lennon, all brilliantly reimagined. Outside of playwriting Kennedy has made her mark as a fiction writer and memoirist, providing a rich portrait of her life and experience especially in her book People Who Led to My Plays but also in works from her later life such as the essay "Almost Eighty." Taken together, the work gathered in Collected Plays & Other Writings is a celebration of Kennedy's indispensable achievement on the stage and on the page alike

Plays: Tiger and the tomboy -- Funnyhouse of a Negro -- Owl answers -- Lesson in dead language -- Rat's mass -- Sun -- Cities in Bézique -- Beast story -- Boats -- Evening with dead Essex -- Diary of lights : New York about 1955 -- Movie star has to star in black and white -- Black Children's Day -- Lancashire lad -- Film festival : the day Jean Seberg died -- She talks to Beethoven -- Ohio State murders -- Film club -- Dramatic circle -- Motherhood 2000 -- June and Jean in concert (Concert of their lives) -- Sleep deprivation chamber (with Adam P. Kennedy) -- Brontë scenes -- Hitler's addendum (with epilogue by Adrienne Kennedy and Adam P. Kennedy) -- Mom, how did you meet the Beatles? (with Adam P. Kennedy) -- He brought her heart back in a box -- Etta and Ella on the upper West Side. -- Adaptations: Lennon play in his own write (with John Lennon and Victor Spinetti) -- Electra (Euripides) -- Orestes (Euripides) -- Madame Bovary (from Gustave Flaubert). --

Fiction, memoirs, and essays.

Because of the King of France -- Milena's wedding -- Growth of images -- Preface to Adrienne Kennedy in one act -- People who led to my plays -- Deadly triplets : a theatre mystery and journal -- Letter to my students on my sixty-first birthday / by Suzanne Alexander -- Secret paragraphs about my brother -- Letter to flowers -- Grendel and Grendel's mother -- On the writing of Funnyhouse of a Negro -- Paragraphs, passages, and pages that changed my life -- Seeking a king -- Bride vanished -- Almost eighty -- On story -- Visited by a phantom --

Chronology -- Note on the texts -- Notes