In One Act
Includes eight one-act plays.
“The playwright and poet Adrienne Kennedy, a visiting professor at Harvard University and one of the black female doyennes of theater, where she has become a role model for a younger generation, was the subject of a yearlong celebration of her work by the Signature Theater Company in 1995-1996.” New York Times March 21, 1999
“Since her earliest plays. . . [Adrienne Kennedy] has been creating frightful and seductive theatrical images of her memories and fantasies. Her black, female protagonists enact Kennedy’s nightmares, then make them ours, enveloping the audience in their relentless anger, madness, and fear . . . time and place shift constantly, plot lines are parceled out in bits, and a contextual frame comes clear gradually, like a reflection is stilling waters.”
-Alisa Solomon
Village Voice
“The playwright and poet Adrienne Kennedy, a visiting professor at Harvard University and one of the black female doyennes of theater, where she has become a role model for a younger generation, was the subject of a yearlong celebration of her work by the Signature Theater Company in 1995-1996.” New York Times March 21, 1999
Adrienne Kennedy is one of America's most important playwrights . . . [yet] her innovative plays have not received the critical attention they deserve. m[They] assimilate the grotesqueries of a John Webster with the painful lyricism of a Sylvia Plath.
World Literature Today
“An extraordinary artist.” George C. Wolfe (from an article on Kennedy in the New York Times, July 1995
“A unique theatrical voice. . . her use of masks, myth and characters played by more than one actor anticipated much in modern theater. Language for her is an incantatory force.” American Academy of Arts and Letters
“You want to read these plays twice, yet at times you want to turn away from the truths exposed. . . . There are strong messages in these plays, messages we need to hear, whether for the first time or again.” Ohioana Quarterly
“Like most great artists in whose work different cultures and styles converge, Adrienne Kennedy is unique.” Ishmael Reed
