Staff Picks: Sinners, Slavery, and Shults

Adrienne Kennedy and her son in 1970. Photo: Jack Robinson

On , I’ll be in the audience of Adrienne Kennedy’s latest play, To prepare for it, I thought I’d revisit a few of the playwright’s earlier works, such as , , and . These one-act plays, along with Kennedy’s interwoven commentary, are bound together, among others, in . The compendium offers a glimpse into the mind of a remarkable dramatist. Surreal, lyrical, and fragmentary, her plays are beautifully merciless in the ways they explore racism, colonialism, womanhood, and the violence inherent in each. In them, time is nonlinear, and characters shift between a multitude of selves. (Take ,for instance, in which there is “she who is Clara Passmore who is the Virgin Mary who is the bastard who is the owl.”) To parse Kennedy’s exquisite experimentalism demands readers give themselves over entirely to the experience of her plays, perhaps reading them again and again. As she tells us in the book’s preface, “The days when I am writing are days of images fiercely pounding in my head.”