A MELUS Interview: Adrienne Kennedy

Abstract

I had wanted to meet Adrienne Kennedy for some time, ever since I had taught two of her dramas in a seminar on Poetry and Drama at the University of Erlangen. During a recent stay in California I mentioned this wish to a friend and colleague of mine, Dr. Erskine Peters of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of California at Berkeley. To my surprise Dr. Peters instantly suggested such a meeting. Ms. Kennedy, a close friend of his, was at that time teaching creative writing at Davis. We met on the Berkeley campus. I taped the interview and transcribed it, and it was consequently amended by Ms. Kennedy. The author struck me as a highly sensitive, nervous, intelligent, charming, if meticulous lady, very demanding of herself and of others. She talked with great warmth about her children, whom she could not see as often as she would have liked to. Evidently, the writer's need and the concomitant difficulty to again produce works of stature after several years of literary silence surfaced in our conversation as it does in the interview. Kennedy's writing, especially the three short dramas that are in print, Funnyhouse of a Negro, The Owl Answers and A Beast Story (the last two titles were juxtaposed in Cities in Bezique) are as fresh, as disquieting and as powerful as ever. These works are triumphs, both technically and psychologically, and merit the continued attention of scholars, readers, and theatre people interested in Black quality writing. As the following interview reveals, these dramas are to some degree exorcizing personal and collective racial traumas and have anger, the urge to communicate and (attempted) liberation as motivating forces. Couched in expressionistic techniques and in the surreal, they show a fragmentization of the psyche and present people, women in particular, who are hopelessly trapped in repressive families and a racist dominant culture, trapped in their blackness (or a bastardly yellowness), trapped in torturing alienation, self-hatred, guilt and an unfulfilled yearning for love. The interview is, among other things, a document on American theatre history. It is not by chance that the names of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Ed Bullins, Amiri Baraka, Lorraine Hansberry, Michael Kahn, Joseph Papp and