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The Alexander Plays Adrienne Kennedy |
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Adrienne Kennedy is an Obie-winning playwright whose work has been central to the development of both black and avant-garde theater since the 1960s. Her plays are brief, eloquent--sometimes exquisitely lyric poems for the theater. Few contemporary female playwrights have so forcefully challenged the boundaries of conventional dramatic treatments of women's lives; none has ranged more widely across the terrain of the minority experience. The Alexander Plays continues the publication of Adrienne Kennedy's collected one-act plays that was begun by the University of Minnesota Press with In One Act. This volume consists of two plays (She Talks to Beethoven and The Ohio State Murders) and a monologue (The Film Club). Each shares the central figure of a prominent writer--Suzanne Alexander. Through Alexander's reflections and recollections, Kennedy contests the conventional bourdaries of narrative structure and raises new questions about form and character. In She Talks to Beethoven Suzanne's attempts to write about and speak with Beethoven are continuously punctuated by radio broadcasts about her husband who is missing under mysterious circumstances. Mediated throughout by snatches of Ghanaian string music juxtaposed against strains of Beethoven's Fidelio, the drama exists within a displacement of time and space, fluctuating between Vienna, Austria, in 1803 (Eurocentric space), and Legon, Ghana, in 1961 (colonized African-American space). In The Ohio State Murders, Suzanne has returned to lecture at Ohio State University, her alma mater. Presented in a series of flashbacks that recall her student days in Columbus, the play is a shocking portrayal of a young African-American woman's struggles in the racially charged America of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The narrative structure melds past and present, allowing various repressions to be articulated on stage. The Film Club is a lyrical monologue delivered by Suzanne (during her husband's imprisonment in Ghana in 1961) recounting the activities of a film club that has been organized to view Bette Davis's movies. With action shifting between Legon and London, Kennedy explores the power of popular culture, the movies in particular, and Bette Davis most specifically. Adrienne Kennedy's play A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White was recently anthologized in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 128 pages | 1992 |
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