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Adrienne Kennedy : collected plays and other writings / Mark Robinson, editor.
Author
Kennedy, Adrienne
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Format
Book
Language
English
Published/Created
New York, N.Y. : The Library of America, [2023]
©2023
Description
xii, 1092 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm
Details
Subject(s)
Kennedy, Adrienne
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Literature
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African Americans
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African Americans in literature
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Editor
Robinson, Marc, 1962-
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Series
Library of America ; 372.
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Summary note
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. Politically engaged, formally daring, and making provocative use of material from contemporary history and popular culture, Kennedy's haunting stage works dramatize and project interior realities that are often marked by disappointment and trauma, madness and terror. Her understanding of the inner lives of African American women expresses a powerfully insightful feminism that has come to influence generations of playwrights and writers. Now, the Library of America presents, for the first time, a collected edition of Kennedy's extraordinary and wide-ranging writings, spanning six decades and including ten unpublished works. Here are the early surrealistic one-acts A Lesson in Dead Language and A Rat's Mass; works like A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White and Film Festival: The Day Jean Seberg Died that reveal Kennedy's longstanding fascination with Hollywood and film culture; and Ohio State Murders, one of several plays featuring her protagonist Suzanne Alexander and the first of her plays to be staged--belatedly, in 2022--on Broadway. Sleep Deprivation Chamber is a searing indictment of racially motivated police violence based on real-life incidents involving her son, who co-wrote the play. Also included here are Kennedy's adaptations of works by Euripides, Flaubert, and John Lennon, all brilliantly reimagined. Outside of playwriting Kennedy has made her mark as a fiction writer and memoirist, providing a rich portrait of her life and experience especially in her book People Who Led to My Plays but also in works from her later life such as the essay "Almost Eighty." Taken together, the work gathered in Collected Plays & Other Writings is a celebration of Kennedy's indispensable achievement on the stage and on the page alike.
Bibliographic references
Includes bibliographical references.
Other title(s)
Library of America.
ISBN
9781598537512
1598537512
OCLC
1443565466
Statement on language in description
Princeton University Library aims to describe library materials in a manner that is respectful to the individuals and communities who create, use, and are represented in the collections we manage.
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