Adrienne Kennedy

Adrienne Kennedy was born Adrienne Lita Hawkins on September 13, 1931, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Etta Hawkins,[7] 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.[8] She grew up in an integrated neighborhood and didn't 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,[9] and the couple had two children, Joseph Jr. and Adam.[8] They divorced in 1966.[10]

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.[11] 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."[12]

A Rat's Mass was produced at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in Manhattan's East Village twice in 1969[13][14] and once in 1971.[15] In 1976, La MaMa's Annex performed the show with music by Cecil Taylor.[16] Sun: A Poem for Malcolm X Inspired By His Death[17] and A Beast Story[18] were both produced at La MaMa in 1974.

As of 2018, Kennedy has written thirteen published and five unpublished plays, several autobiographies, a novella, and a short story. 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.[19] Much of Kennedy's work is based on her lived experience.[8]

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 in 1978.[8]

Suzanne Alexander is a recurring character in several of Kennedy's plays. She Talks to Beethoven, The Ohio State Murders, The Film Club, and The Dramatic Circle are collectively known as the Alexander Plays, and were published together under that title in 1992.[20] A letter written from Suzanne Alexander's perspective, "Letter to My Students on My Sixty-First Birthday by Suzanne Alexander," was also published in 1992. The Alexander plays are less overtly surreal than many of Kennedy's earlier works, but still avoid linear narrative. In the foreword to the printed collection of plays, Alisa Solomon, professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, wrote: "the action of these plays is made up not of the events of Suzanne's life but of the process of turning memory into meaning."[21]

She won several awards for her plays, including two Village Voice Obie Awards. Her Obie Awards were for "Distinguished Play" in 1964 for Funnyhouse of a Negro[22] and "Best New American Play" in 1996 for June and Jean in Concert and Sleep Deprivation Chamber.[23] She was also honored at the 2008 Obie Awards with a Lifetime Achievement Award.[24]

She was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1967, Rockefeller Foundation grants in 1967 and again in 1970, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1972, the Creative Artists Public Service grant in 1974, the 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards,[25] and the Pierre Lecomte du Noüy Award.[1][26][27] In 1994, she won the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers' Award[28] and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in Literature.[29] Kennedy received the Third Annual Manhattan Borough President's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1988.[30] In 2006, Kennedy received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a Master American Dramatist.

In July 1995, she was named playwright in residence for the September 1995 - May 1996 season with the Signature Theater Company in New York City.[31]

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.[32] In 2003, she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Literature by her undergraduate alma mater, Ohio State University.[27]

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Adrienne Kennedy

• Adrienne Kennedy Papers, Harry Ransom Center
• Kennedy's page on La MaMa Archives Digital Collections
• Adrienne Kennedy profile, doollee.com (subscription required)
• Archived profile of Adrienne Kennedy
• Ryan Spahn, "Spawned From Deep Experience: Corresponding With Adrienne Kennedy, Juilliard Journal, February 2013
• Alexis Soloski, "Adrienne Kennedy, Playwright: Still Quiet, Still Bold, Still Furious", The New York Times, January 10, 2018
• Hilton Als, "Adrienne Kennedy’s Startling Body of Work", The New Yorker, February 12 & 19, 2018