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“An Evasion of Ontology” “An Evasion of Ontology” Being Adrienne Kennedy Claudia Barnett Introduction “I am glad you wrote this play because if you hadn’t I wouldn’t know you. I wish you the very best tonight and always. Love Jack.” This almost anonymous telegram, among Adrienne Kennedy’s correspondence on file at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin (file .), innocently anticipates a theme that has come to define Kennedy’s career: the distinction—or lack thereof—between playwright and play. “Jack” might have met Kennedy at the theatre or he might simply have seen the play and felt empathy toward its creator. The two possibilities imply vastly different yet inter- dependent ways of knowing, neither one superior or definitive, as Kennedy her- self has recognized. What it means to know Adrienne Kennedy—and what it means to know anyone—is a question and challenge she poses in her writing. Reality is part of the issue, one she defines in terms of perspective:“The point is, if I’m reading a book about Beethoven in July, Beethoven is definitely more real to me than members of my family at that moment” (in Diamond :). As her concept of reality keeps changing, so, it seems, does her definition of herself and her work. She has said, “Autobiographical work is the only thing that inter- ests me, apparently because that is what I do best” (:), yet she seems sur- prised when audiences confuse her with her characters:“My plays are the product of my imagination, but there are people who literally want to make me Sarah [Funnyhouse]; they think she has my background” (in Diamond :). These comments only seem contradictory, however, if one defines autobiographical liter- ally, which Kennedy never does. Some of her characters, who include historical figures such as Queen Victoria and Marlon Brando, are clearly not Kennedy, yet at the same time, the deeply personal truth of her writing, no matter the charac- ter, leaves her self vulnerable and exposed. “Let me tell you something,”Kennedy once said to an interviewer, “I get very upset when I read people’s analysis of my work. I try not to read it. It makes me uncomfortable [...] to have people dissect my psyche” (a:). She sees literary analysis as tantamount to psychoanaly- sis because her work is her self—even though it is not necessarily about herself. When Funnyhouse of a Negro was set to be staged at Edward Albee’s playwrights’ workshop in , Kennedy remembers:“I became frightened. My play seemed far too revealing and much to my own shock, I had used the word ‘nigger’ throughout the text.” She decided to drop the class and told Albee, “I don’t want The Drama Review 49, 3 (T187), Fall 2005. © 2005 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204054742417 by guest on 25 September 2021 Claudia Barnett that original version done in the workshop, that would be too upsetting. [...] I’m worried about what I said about my parents, even though it’s fictionalized” (a: ). Albee “stuck his hands in his pockets,” fixed her with a “hypnotic” gaze, and said, “Well, do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts out on the stage and that’s what you’ve done in this play” (:–). Although she still considers the play “so very revealing of my psyche—if not of me, personally” (a:), she heeded Albee’s advice and endured her harrowing success, as she has continued to do for over years. Meanwhile she has honed her tools of self-revelation, skillfully maneuvering the fine 1.Adrienne Kennedy at the line between truth and fiction. The polar forces that define Kennedy’s writing— Signature Theatre Company, the need to reveal and the need to conceal—have led her to create not only a se- 2005/2006. (Photo by Susan ries of powerful plays but a richly woven tapestry. Taken individually, each of her Johann) plays is a burst of poetic violence that somehow relates to the playwright’s life; taken as a whole, however, her writing becomes a multilayered puzzle to chal- lenge audiences and readers who feel compelled to “know” the playwright—a coup-de-grace performance in itself. Elin Diamond makes much of Kennedy’s statement during a public interview in —“I want to be Bette Davis”—arguing that it “[lays] bare the problemat- ics of identity” (:). In saying that she wants to be—rather than to be like— the white film star, Kennedy draws attention to the difference in race and the subsequent impossibility of identification, and as Diamond writes: “Attired in a dark suit and white frilly blouse, she called to our collective mind the star image of Bette Davis and in that moment foregrounded the racism inscribed in classi- cal mimesis” (). Comparing this comment with one made by Kennedy’s Funny- house character, Sarah, who says, “I want not to be,” Diamond explains, “Each is an evasion of ontology” (). While the desire to be Other does not necessarily imply the negation of self, Sarah projects four alternate selves who replace her, ul- timately resulting in her death. “No contemporary U.S. playwright has theatri- calized the disturbances of identification with the acuity of Adrienne Kennedy” (Diamond :). Not only does Kennedy theatricalize these disturbances, she embodies them. Kennedy’s own evasion of ontology can be traced back to her first publication, a short story titled “Because of the King of France” (). She remembers meet- ing the editor Ulli Bieir in Africa: “he invited us to Nigeria to meet his wife, a painter, who lived there. Word seemed to travel fast in West Africa among for- eigners. It was soon known that I was having a story published in Black Orpheus” (Kennedy b:). Kennedy does not mention the ironic part of this story: that she became well-known in spite of her use of a pseudonym, “Adrienne Cor- nell.”Her intention in choosing the name might have been to honor her brother, whose first name was Cornell, and/or equally likely, as her conversation with Albee suggests, to hide herself (even though her stronger impulse to establish her- self as a writer prevailed). She thus divulged her dialectical disposition in her ear- liest work. Similarly, in an answer to Diamond during an interview, Kennedy obliquely differentiates between her two identities—“the playwright” and “I”: “Yes, but that’s the playwright speaking. I just wanted [...]” (in Diamond :). This distinction aligns her with her characters who project various selves, twins, döppelgangers, and others into their lives. It also betrays an awareness that in the creation of her work, she has created her own alternate self. Being Adrienne Kennedy and being “Adrienne Kennedy”—the person versus the persona—are two vastly different, yet ultimately indistinguishable, things. Floating above the Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204054742417 by guest on 25 September 2021 Adrienne Kennedy writing and filtered through it, this playwright-self emerges as an enigma—invit- ing and resisting interpretation as much as any of the plays. This self, like the work, is a composite figure; it is also Kennedy’s grand achievement. In , Kennedy published her autobiography, a scrapbook-style montage of photos and vignettes titled People Who Led to My Plays, “designed to answer the question that students and directors most frequently ask: who or what influenced you to write the way you do?” (Diamond :). Ironically, Kennedy never actually answers the question, but instead creates another layer within it, as Dia- mond explains to the playwright: A strange thing happens with material you supply in People that almost works against the aesthetic of your plays. Works against because you delib- erately undermine the operation of truth in your drama. [... N]ow your readers will be tempted to fill in what your plays deny. [...] On the other hand, [...] the autobiography just gives us another Kennedy text, no more true than the plays. (:) The temptation to “fill in” is part of the allure of Kennedy’s drama. Part of the reason for this is, as Diamond suggests, “there is so much psychic pain in the early plays” (:). Another explanation is that Kennedy’s characters tend to be writers, so audiences see them as extensions of the playwright. For instance, in A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (), Clara recites from Kennedy’s The Owl Answers () and calls it “my play” (:). Most of the later plays re- volve around one character, Suzanne Alexander, a playwright who shares life experiences with Kennedy. With The Alexander Plays, a collection published in , after the autobiography, Kennedy self-consciously incorporates details she knows her readers will recognize while at the same time creating a mass of con- tradictions. For instance, in The Ohio State Murders (), Suzanne meets her fu- ture husband David after the murder of her twins. But in the next play in the series, The Dramatic Circle (not yet produced), she tells her doctor, “We went to school together as children. We won the state reading contest together” ([] :). Finally, in a convoluted confession in “Letter to My Students on My Sixty-first Birthday by Suzanne Alexander,” Suzanne writes about herself in the third-person, using the imagined voice of her sister-in-law, Alice:“She still some- 2.Tim Michael, Jennifer Gibbs, and Sanaa Lathan in A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976), directed by Joseph Chaikin, Signature Theatre Company; presented as a double bill with Funnyhouse of a Negro during Signature’s 1995/1996 season.
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