Adrienne Kennedy The Subject's Tragedy Analysis

By formulating her characters to express multiple viewpoints, Kennedy resisted any monolithic definition of blackness propounded by the hegemonic culture, while foregrounding the deconstruction of subjectivity. Herbert Blau, in an article comparing Kennedy and Sam Shepard, describes Kennedy 's stagecraft "black magic" (535), a label which can be extended to her work in general, since her writing engages the audience in a nightmarish

To Blau, Kennedy is “surely the most original black writer of her generation,” (qtd in, Kolin, Understanding Kennedy, 1) and her monographer, Philip C. Kolin, notes that her plays “offer immense insight into the idea of cultural identity. Kennedy’s canon vibrates with the tension and tragedy of what it means to be black in a white world.” (ibid, 2) Her black African-American heroines are caught between the radically opposite alternatives of metropolitan white industrial culture and black African tribal origins, between genetic memory and cultural remembering, between their biological markers that provoke the culturally specific meanings and their search for an independent identity (Kolin, Understanding Kennedy, 2). Robert Brustein, director of the American Repertory Theater, commented that Kennedy 's plays are "strong dreams that reveal us in our most vulnerable moments." (Sollors, “The Theater of Adrienne Kennedy”.) Thirty-five years after Funnyhouse, Village Voice writer, Lisa Jones, recognized Kennedy as the creator of "out-of-kilter, lyrical, and drop-dead brilliant work for the American theater." (Sollors, “The Theater of Adrienne