Adrienne Kennedy

Adrienne Kennedy (born September 13, 1931) is an African-American playwright. She is best known for her first major play, Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964).Kennedy has been a force in American theater since the early 1960s, influencing generations of playwrights with her hauntingly fragmentary lyrical dramas. Exploring the violence racism visits upon peoples lives, Kennedys plays express poetic alienation, transcending the particulars of character and plot through ritualistic repetition and radical structural experimentation. Many of Kennedys plays explore issues of race, kinship, and violence in American society, and many of her works are autobiographically inspired.In 1995, critic Michael Feingold of the Village Voice declared that with Beckett gone, Adrienne Kennedy is probably the boldest artist now writing for the theater.Kennedy is noted for the use of surrealism in her plays. Her plays are often plotless and symbolic, drawing on mythical, historical and imaginary figures to depict and explore the American experience.New York Times critic Clive Barnes noted that 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.

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