Wendy S. Walters is the author of Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal. She lives in New York City.
When I was young and obsessed with the challenges that come with living a creative life, there was only one writer who did the kind of work I wanted to do: the playwright Adrienne Kennedy. I first encountered Kennedy’s work in a Black theater class in college where we read one of her early plays: Funnyhouse of a Negro, alongside Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman. Both works depict how racial violence might be veiled by the rhetoric of assimilation.
In a New York Times profile on Kennedy published in 2018, Yale professor Daphne Brooks proclaimed that Kennedy’s plays “brought to life the depths of black female interiority and the aching humanity of black womanhood.” And long before Hamilton’s color-blind casting, Kennedy’s Funnyhouse challenged the visual imaginations of readers and audiences by creating racially composite characters who show how one’s ancestors might manifest as antagonists.
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