Adrienne Kennedy: Collected Plays & Other Writings

Adrienne Kennedy has been a force on the American stage since the premiere of her groundbreaking, Obie Award–winning Funnyhouse of a Negro in 1964. Her haunting and powerful plays, filled with unexpected juxtapositions and startling transfigurations, dramatize interior realities “in a dreamlike fashion, never taking a straight path from one event to another if a more beautiful route is available,” in the words of actor Natalie Portman. For the critic Hilton Als, Kennedy “is a kind of film scenarist … whose strongest work renders the stage more cinema-like, less intransigent, more open to different ways of moving.” This Library of America volume presents, for the first time, a collected edition of Adrienne Kennedy’s writing, spanning six decades and including five uncollected and ten previously unpublished works. 
 

Marc Robinson is Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and English in FAS.