Invisible career

Adrienne Kennedy steps into the light

by Scott T. Cummings

The line between fact and fiction has always been difficult to trace in the work of Adrienne Kennedy. For four decades, she has been writing the most intensely personal plays of any playwright in the USA, yet to call them autobiographical is misleading. They are about her and not about her, and this paradox gives her work a power, an intimacy, and a truthfulness that few others achieve. How can it be, then, that she is one of the least-produced major playwrights in the American theater?

Starting this weekend, local audiences will get a rare opportunity to experience Kennedy's work firsthand when the American Repertory Theatre presents The Ohio State Murders at the Hasty Pudding Theatre. Kennedy spent the fall 1999 semester as a visiting professor in the English department at Harvard, teaching playwriting and a course on "Black Playwrights of the World." Back in December, near the end of the term, I met with her in her wood-paneled office in the Barker Center to talk about The Ohio State Murders, her writing, and her nearly invisible career as an African-American playwright.

"My plays are mainly taught. That's why ART is a very big deal for me," says Kennedy, who came of age as a playwright during the Off Broadway movement of the 1960s. Her first play, Funnyhouse of a Negro, was produced in Greenwich Village in 1965 by Edward Albee's playwrights' workshop and won an Obie. She got a Rockefeller grant. Joseph Papp produced her. She worked with John Lennon on a stage adaptation of his prose sketches. But something about the fierce subjectivity and experimental form of her work made it difficult to categorize and slow to catch on. She was too black and too female for the white male avant-garde, too avant-garde for the emerging black and feminist theater, and too all-of-that for the mainstream. This did not prevent her from pursuing her unusual vision in the likes of A Movie Star Has To Star in Black and White (1976), She Talks to Beethoven (1990), and Sleep Deprivation Chamber, which she wrote with her son Adam and which went on to win the 1996 Obie Award for Best Play.

Steeped in the most intimate details of her own life, Kennedy's works are dream plays, lyrical explorations of a troubled consciousness, female and black, often divided against itself and at odds with the world around it. How does she determine when to use a fact or event from her life and when to invent something? "I am just trying to create as strong a heroine as possible. I don't know when I choose from these different arenas. I have this idea in my mind that Jane Eyre was a heroine, Anna Karenina was a heroine, Emma Bovary. I am just trying to create a heroine. That is all I am trying to do. And I learned many years ago, in my 20s, that if it was totally from my imagination, if it doesn't have some facets of something I have been through, my work is weak. I started to do that in Funnyhouse of a Negro when I put Sarah on the Upper West Side [where Kennedy lived]. That was a big breakthrough for me. And then I had Clara in The Owl Answers take a trip on the Queen Elizabeth [which Kennedy did]. All I am trying to do is to give it strength."

These two plays are typical of Kennedy's early work, which often takes the form of a disturbing, almost hallucinogenic interior monologue. Dense and violent in its imagery, dazzling and surreal in its theatricality, each play refracts its heroine into multiple, fragmented identities that then resist coherent reintegration. The heroine of The Owl Answers is the character named "SHE who is CLARA PASSMORE who is the VIRGIN MARY who is the BASTARD who is the OWL." The focus shifts from one alter ego to another in the blink of an eye, with dizzying effect.

The Ohio State Murders is more outwardly conventional and accessible, but the same troubling issues lurk. The play takes the form of a lecture given by Suzanne Alexander, a well-known African-American writer from Cleveland who has accepted an invitation to return to her alma mater, Ohio State University, to talk about her work. Adrienne Kennedy grew up in a middle-class neighborhood of blacks and immigrants on the east side of Cleveland. Her father was a social worker, her mother a schoolteacher. She left home in 1949 to attend Ohio State University, where blacks were segregated socially and actively discouraged from pursuing certain majors, such as English. At the age of 18, Kennedy was experiencing a culture of racism for the first time.

Roughly 10 years ago, she accepted an invitation to return to Ohio State for a visit. "They had been trying to get me to come for years," she recalls. "I liked Alan Woods -- he was the chair of Theater -- he wrote me so many nice letters. I just went and talked about my work. They didn't seem to have any particular understanding of my work. I was this person who had gone to Ohio State." During her visit, she had an unsettling experience. "It made me very uncomfortable. They suggested that I have lunch with a group of black theater students who were unhappy there. This is 40 years later and they had the same complaints. They felt the same unhappiness. I just found it so disturbing that this group of black students wanted to talk to me about how unhappy they were there. I found it very disturbing."

When I ask why, Kennedy cannot say in so many words, but I get the sense that it had to do with being asked to "represent" something to these students, as if that would ameliorate the situation or even address the issues that bothered them. Whatever that discomforting feeling was, Kennedy exorcised it and the lingering distress of her own undergraduate years in The Ohio State Murders. She admits that the autobiographical aspect of her work changes her perspective on the experiences she writes about. "It makes it possible for me to put it behind me. There's no doubt about that. It recedes slowly from a place of importance. The Ohio State Murders definitely served that purpose. It was very important to me to try to get the historical parts right, to get the texts that we read, T.S. Eliot, Hardy, the number of students that were at Ohio State, the buildings, all that, quite accurate. But I knew there was no story that I could tell that happened to me, so I just made up a story."

Said story turns out to be something of a murder mystery that unfolds over the course of the lecture Suzanne Alexander rehearses late at night deep in the stacks of the Ohio State University library. She speaks of her burgeoning love of literature and the birth of her twin daughters, who were conceived out of wedlock. These memories give way to periodic lyrical flashbacks, some only a few lines long, as actors emerge from the dark to play her dormitory roommate, an old boyfriend, herself as a co-ed, her future husband, an aunt who sheltered her when she got pregnant, and an English professor who embodies both the bounty and the violence of the majority white culture that both attracts and repels her.

Originally commissioned by Great Lakes Theatre Festival in Cleveland, The Ohio State Murders received its world premiere there is 1992 (in a production that starred Ruby Dee), a year after a workshop production at the Yale Repertory Theatre. The Signature Theatre in New York dedicated its 1995-'96 season to the works of Adrienne Kennedy; The Ohio State Murders was scheduled to conclude the season, but the production was never fully realized. The ART staging is directed by associate director Marcus Stern; it stars television and film actress Denise Nicholas, who's best known for her role as Harriet DeLong on the long-running small-screen version of In the Heat of the Night.

Artistic director Robert Brustein first gave the script to Stern to look at around five years ago, shortly after Stern had directed a play that was clearly influenced by Kennedy's work, Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Play. For various reasons a production of The Ohio State Murders did not become feasible until this season. Stern recalls his "first fascinations" with the play: "I thought it was a remarkable wedding of form and content. It felt extremely heartfelt -- it made me sad -- and it seemed mysterious in its cumulative power. It was undefinable in a way. I couldn't pin down what made it so powerful and how Adrienne pulled it off so beautifully." That's the kind of reaction that whets the directorial appetite of Stern, whose productions (among them Buried Child and Woyzeck at ART) are often marked by a visual expressionism. In staging The Ohio State Murders, he has taken the liberty of shifting the play's present tense from a private practice session the night before, as indicated in the text, to the actual moment of Suzanne Alexander's public lecture. "I feel like it puts more pressure on the situation. I think it makes for a more interesting balancing act."

As a black woman in white America, as a private person writing for the public forum of the theater, Kennedy has pursued her own delicate balancing act since she first attended Ohio State 50 years ago. In that time, she says, race relations have not changed: "It doesn't matter that there are a few more doctors, a few more lawyers, a few people who become millionaires, all these athletes, whatever. To me that has nothing to do with that elemental attitude toward us. I feel that American blacks, we are a group of people that white America still craves to stigmatize, to put in a category and keep in a category, and that is all I have to say. I feel that very strongly. I experience it every single day."

The Ohio State Murders is presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Hasty Pudding Theatre March 31 through April 16. Tickets are $25 to $35. Call 547-8300.