Adrienne Kennedy

Adrienne Kennedy (born September 13, 1931) is an American playwright.

Adrienne Kennedy was born Adrienne Lita Hawkins on September 13, 1931, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Her mother, Etta Hawkins, was a teacher, and her father, Cornell Wallace Hawkins, was a social worker.

She spent most of her childhood in Cleveland, Ohio, attending Cleveland public schools.

She grew up in an integrated neighborhood and did not experience much racism until attending college at Ohio State University.

As a child, she spent most of her time reading books like Jane Eyre and The Secret Garden instead of playing games with other children.

She admired actors like Orson Welles and began to focus on theater during her teenage years.

The Glass Menagerie was among the first plays she saw produced, inspiring her to explore her passion for playwriting.

Her interest in playwriting continued when she started at Ohio State in 1949.

She graduated from Ohio State in 1953 with a bachelor's degree in education and continued her studies at Columbia University in 1954–56.

She married Joseph Kennedy on May 15, 1953, a month after graduating from Ohio State, and the couple had two children, Joseph Jr. and Adam P. Kennedy.

Kennedy has been contributing to American theater since the early 1960s, influencing generations of playwrights with her haunting, fragmentary lyrical dramas.

Exploring the violence racism brings to people's lives, Kennedy's plays express poetic alienation, transcending the particulars of character and plot through ritualistic repetition and radical structural experimentation.

Much of her work explores issues of race, kinship, and violence in American society, and many of her plays are "autobiographically inspired."

Kennedy is noted for the use of surrealism in her plays, which are often plotless and symbolic, drawing on mythical, historical, and imaginary figures to depict and explore the African-American experience.

Her first play to be produced was Funnyhouse of a Negro, a one-act play she wrote in 1960, the year she visited Ghana for a few months with her husband on his grant from the African Research Foundation.

The play draws on Kennedy's African and European heritage as she explores a "black woman's psyche, riven by personal and inherited psychosis, at the root of which is the ambiguously double failure of both rapacious white society and its burdened yet also distorted victims."

Kennedy used the alias Adrienne Cornell for the short story "Because of the King of France", published in Black Orpheus: A Journal of African and Afro-American Literature in 1963.

Much of Kennedy's work is based on her lived experience.

In 2022, Kennedy made her Broadway debut with the opening of her 1992 play Ohio State Murders at the James Earl Jones Theatre on December 8, starring Audra McDonald, and directed by Kenny Leon.

with its last performance taking place on January 15, 2023.

Speaking in an interview with Time Out magazine about what she hopes audiences will take away from seeing the play, Kennedy stated: "I want them to realize that they're listening to a very articulate, thoughtful American Black woman and, perhaps, they should pay attention to what she's saying."

Despite its appraisal, its showtime was closed early due to its lack of commercial success and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had affected the revival of commercial theater in New York since then.

The production received positive reviews and McDonald received a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play for her role.

Suzanne Alexander is a recurring character in several of Kennedy's plays.

She is best known for Funnyhouse of a Negro, which premiered in 1964 and won an Obie Award.

She won a lifetime Obie as well.

They divorced in 1966.

In 1969, The New York Times critic Clive Barnes wrote: "While almost every black playwright in the country is fundamentally concerned with realism—LeRoi Jones and Ed Bullins at times have something different going but even their symbolism is straightforward stuff—Miss Kennedy is weaving some kind of dramatic fabric of poetry."

A Rat's Mass was produced at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in Manhattan's East Village twice in 1969 and once in 1971.

Kennedy was a founding member of the Women's Theatre Council in 1971, a member of the board of directors of PEN in 1976–77, and an International Theatre Institute representative in Budapest, Hungary, in 1978.

Kennedy has taught or lectured at Yale University (1972–74), Princeton University (1977), Brown University (1979–1980), University of California, Berkeley (1986), Harvard University (1991), Stanford University, New York University, and University of California, Davis.

Sun: A Poem for Malcolm X Inspired By His Death and A Beast Story were both produced at La MaMa in 1974.

In 1976, La MaMa's Annex performed the show with music by Cecil Taylor.

Her memoir People Who Led to My Plays, first published in 1987, was reissued in 2016.

In 1995, critic Michael Feingold of the Village Voice wrote that, "with Samuel Beckett gone, Adrienne Kennedy is probably the boldest artist now writing for the theater."

Kennedy has also written in other genres, including poetry and essays.

In 2018 she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.

In 2022, Kennedy received the Gold Medal for Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; given every six years, it has been awarded to only 16 people, including Eugene O'Neill.

As of 2018, Kennedy has written thirteen published and five unpublished plays, several autobiographies, a novella, and a short story.