Victoria claims that he is dead before the loud knocking ends and the lights go out in the chamber. The scene begins with a movement sequence between the Duchess and Jesus, similar to that between the Duchess and the Queen, in which the two characters sit on a bench, attempting to brush the shreds of hair left on their heads. Introduction The Duchess set sail for Europe to ask Napoleon III for aid, and when he refused her, she went to Rome to ask the Pope. Through Sarah is in whiteface, her "wild kinky hair" is highlighted, reminding the audience of who is beneath the mask. In his major scene with the Duchess, Jesus shows her how all his hair has fallen out. As the final scene begins, a new wall drops onto stage. She revises the meaning of minstrelsy through enactment of white, rather than black, representation. Jesus is upset that he lost his hair. Although Kennedy later introduces a bald head that drops and hangs from the ceiling to indicate the martyrdom of Christ and Lumumba, the baldness of Victoria and the Duchess is more “hideous” and frightening because it links them to Sarah’s dead mother. . In Funnyhouse of a Negro, Kennedy used expressionism as a means to take the mind into social, psychological and political realms. In 1990 she wrote a play based on her college experiences. The play was written during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, which had a strong masculine element. Compare and contrast the character of Sarah with Clara from Kennedy’s 1965 play. Here is Youtube of Funny House of a Negro, perhaps still her most famous play from 1964 (some people still tell me it is my best, though that’s disappointinng given how long ago I wrote it) (From Funnyhouse of a Negro.) Themes “‘She was a funny little liar,’” Raymond comments as he observes her hanging figure. Far from empowering her, these character masks trap Sarah in a role of self-hatred, fear, and the inability to integrate her personality that leads to her suicide. She carries before her a bald head, an image of weakness that recurs as Sarah’s selves lose their wild, kinky hair throughout the play. Kennedy’s use of hair underscores the idea that Sarah tried to disavow—then kill—the African American part of her background. These two white characters in Sarah’s “funnyhouse” are modelled after the looming clownlike figures that guard an amusement park in Kennedy’s hometown, Cleveland. In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, which suggested that women could find fulfillment in the workplace. Annotated Bibliography. The material here couldn’t be much more important to begin with, so that’s all right, I guess, and the style does seem appropriate. He was an African revolutionary leader who was murdered around the time the play was written. Funnyhouse of a Negro, although written in 1969, is still a valid reminder of how much we still need to achieve in terms of truly appreciating racial and gender diversity among us. Binder, Wolfgang. "[5], Sexuality is not prevalent in the play, as Sarah is repulsed by and fears to form any sort of union with her father. Many civil rights activists traveled to Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to educate black voters about their rights and get them registered to vote. Kennedy discovered, however, that these roles, designated like those in many black protest groups by men, fail to allow female participants self-determination. Maternal love, then, is a precondition of spatial awareness, laughter, and language. When Sarah visits her white boyfriend Raymond (in her mind), it is in the persona of the Duchess. One symbol in the play, Funnyhouse of a Negro, is dark skin. This play took a look into the tortured mind of Sarah, a college student, also referred to as “Negro… In the last lines of play, Raymond thinks he knows the truth about his girlfriend: Sarah was a liar, her father is an African-American doctor who is alive, and that he has a white wife (who may or may not be Sarah’s mother as depicted in the play). Article Critique. I know you are a child of torment.... Forgive my blackness!” her father pleads. That is, I cannot believe in places.” Place, for her, suggests a concreteness which implies potential connections—impossible connections: To believe in places is to know hope and to know the emotion of hope is to know beauty. Harrison in The Drama of Nommo.] Sarah’s fourth self, Jesus, is a dwarf and a hunchback with yellow skin. But I do not. One of the sides of herself is Patrice Lumumba, an indication that she has reflected on and imagined a central role for herself in the African struggle for independence. Hair plays a complex role in Funnyhouse. Source: A. Petrusso, for Drama for Students, Gale, 2000. The play shows how black women suffer from their circumstances and that they are also susceptible to mental instability. “In the Vatican, [she] collapsed, drifted away into a nightmare world of schizophrenia” [according to Dorothy Gies McGvigan in The Hapsburgs] Back in Mexico, Maximilian was shot as a traitor. Search the world's most comprehensive index of full-text books. This emphasizes her inner pain as well as her eventual fate. With her inner selves walking around her, Sarah describes how her paternal grandmother wanted her father to be Christ and save his people. He carries an ebony mask”—-combines her visions of both martyr and oppressor. However, Sarah’s splitting is not as decisive as she might wish and it is ultimately unsuccessful. Raymond is a Jewish poet who lives above Sarah in the rooming house. Sarah and her four inner selves use their monologues to relate a version of Sarah’s family background and emotional crisis. "[5] All of the characters run around the stage laughing and screaming until the blackout. Their world is not fundamentally without meaning, but such meaning is deliberately withheld. She was raised in an ethnically diverse neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, where her father worked as a social worker and her mother was a schoolteacher. Although her rhetoric maintains a political agenda, albeit one aimed more at expressing black women’s struggles, Kennedy’s method draws from the mythic elements of traditional African ritual drama, particularly the Kuntu form described by Paul Carter Harrison. Sarah seeks to neutralize her blackness by living with her white boyfriend, Raymond Mann, whom she wishes she could love but doesn’t, in an apartment run by a white landlady, Mrs. Conrad. When two of them—Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Haps-burg—are introduced, they each have a full head of kinky hair. Like her father, Lumumba is a “large dark faceless Man,” and like her father he has attempted to save the African people. Last Updated on May 6, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. “My white friends, like myself, will be shrewd, intellectual and anxious for death. Like all the inner selves, he loses almost all of his hair. Author Biography They call the father a "wild beast" who raped Sarah's mother, and compare his blackness to the mother's whiteness. She states within the play that the only "acceptable" part of her is her yellow skin. Funnyhouse of a Negro contains lengthy, lyrical monologues with repetitive phrases as a means for unnatural dialogue (Kennedy 5 – ff), also typical for early German expressionist theatre (Styan 5). Sarah, on the contrary, has been multiplied. After her mad mother introduces the play’s action, Sarah and her selves confront her fear that her father will find and rape her as he did her mulatto mother. Most reviewers viewed it as an important exploration of race and identity in contemporary society. Like her mother before her, she has lost her hair because of the jungle. Many activists were arrested, beaten, and even killed. Furthermore, the inner selves believe that their father killed their mother and that he is also dead. Symbolically then the appropriate place for Sarah’s final disintegration is the jungle. Sarah’s four selves represent different aspects of her identity: the Duchess and Queen Victoria wear masks or mask-like makeup and white clothing reminiscent of funeral shrouds; Jesus is a yellow-skinned hunch-backed dwarf; and Patrice Lumumba carries an ebony mask. Parks has written more than 20 plays, of which the most famous remains Topdog/Underdog (1999), whose central character is an adaptation of the Lincoln impersonator the Foundling Father, from The America Play. Source: Lorraine A. I know no places. Kennedy never got a chance to fulfill his agenda; tragically, he was assassinated in November 1963. ." In quotations, whenever I refer to Funnyhouse of a Negro – I use Funnyhouse… Finally, they say that they are bound to the father unless he dies. Curb calls Sarah “the battlefield for warring forces forever opposed and terrified of invasion.” These theories coincide with Klein’s model of splitting and projective identification in which objects are split between good and >bad, ideal and persecutory. Very little is realistic in the play. The playwright, best known for the 1964 “Funnyhouse of a Negro,” has a lengthy C.V. of plays and honors, including Obie Awards, a Guggenheim and a spot in the Theater Hall of Fame. Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro uses many symbols to underscore the torment that Sarah feels about herself and her racial identity. These critics see Sarah’s selves as antitheses; they see her inner turmoil caused by the inherent conflicts she embodies. 40, no. Her hair is curly and wild, prominently showcasing her blackness. A: Adrienne Kennedy Pf: 1962, New York Pb: 1969 G: … 86–88. The Duchess of Hapsburg and Queen Victoria are figures of white and female power she would like to identify with, were it not for her Negro hair.” Lorraine A. The Queen and the Duchess, in light of this description, hardly seem enviable. Many of her characters become trapped in the mask’s freakish impersonality and are unable either to discover themselves fully or to escape from the horrifying selves they do discover. At the time of her trip, Kennedy had been writing stories and plays for nearly ten years and had received virtually no public attention. When the play opens, the first character seen on stage is a representation of Sarah’s mother. The statue itself is an ideal object, one which Sarah wants “to acquire, to keep inside and to identify with”; thus she has purchased the statue, brought it home, and built three steps as its shrine. The play opens with a dreamlike sequence of a woman in a white nightgown with long, dark hair crossing the stage. By the end of the play, it is clear that Sarah has killed herself. This exploration is accomplished structurally by the creation of a rich montage of images and impressions which appear, fade, and recur. Sarah hits him with an ebony hand. Sarah transforms her world into a house of mirrors where she watches herselves in the glass; she becomes an outsider observing her life. Brown, ‘“For the Characters Are Myself’: Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro,” in Negro American Literature Forum, 1975, Vol. Source: Susan E. Meigs, “No Place but the Funnyhouse: The Struggle for Identity in Three Adrienne Kennedy Plays,” in Modern American Drama: The Female Canon, edited by June Schlueter, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990, pp. Sarah cannot escape her racial heritage, no matter how white she tries to be. Sarah feels neither linked nor connected to the world; she feels she does not exist in a concrete place with other people but only in her mind, her “rooms,” her funnyhouse. As Kennedy’s significance in the theater world was recognized, her plays were performed again. Case Brief. Even when two appear together, they fail to engage in dialogue; instead, one continues a haunted monotone at the point at which another leaves off. Yet when Sarah’s mother first appears on stage, she is carrying a bald head, establishing her link between hair and hair loss. way of dealing with her identity issues—represents a facet of Sarah. Style Format: Book: Language: English: Published: New York : Samuel French, c1969. Disarmed and unprotected, an archetypal fallen woman, she pleads for love from the “ghostly thin” poet with black sores on his face. Her failure to establish herself as a writer was made more discouraging by the recognition her husband Joseph Kennedy received for his work in social psychology at Columbia. He carries an ebony mask. [2] Sarah is torn between the paradoxes of black and white, past and present, flesh and spirit. Sarah repeatedly says that she wants to “escape the jungle”—implying that she wants to be more white. [7], Adrienne Kennedy's interest in foreign landscapes crystallized in 1960 while aboard the Queen Elizabeth to England, France, Spain, and Africa. The scene, the longest in the play, moves slowly, as in the last stages of a dream. Ntozake Shange, Aishah Rahman, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Robbie McCauley were all influenced by Kennedy. Adrienne Kennedy in One Act. The scene shifts into one of Sarah's monologues, and ends with a comment from the landlady, who is one of the few characters who exists outside of Sarah's mind and therefore one of the few manifestations of reality in the play. But black is also a sign of death: black ravens fly about the Queen’s chamber and the death mask Lumumba carries is ebony. Kennedy was born Adrienne Hawkins on September 13, 1931, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Even though I had known him so briefly, I felt I had been struck a blow. Inside the Duchess’s place (a ballroom with a chandelier), Jesus and the Duchess talk. However, in his hand he carries her father’s murder weapon, as he himself admits: “I [have] bludgeoned my father’s face with the ebony mask.” In this self, then, Sarah combines her aggressions and her affections toward her father and her African heritage; she does not divide them into two distinct selves. Brantley, Ben. ." The next scene takes place in a jungle, which covers the entire stage, while Sarah's bedroom remains in the background. As Sarah continues to talk, her four inner selves stand together on stage: in addition to the Queen and the Duchess, a hunchbacked dwarf named Jesus and a black man with a split head named Patrice Lumumba make an appearance. Later, Queen Victoria’s hair falls out while she is asleep, though she does not reveal this in words. To demonstrate this internal struggle, Kennedy transforms the stage into a manifestation of Sarah's mind and uses historical figures to represent Sarah's mixed black and white ancestry. Raymond and Mrs. Conrad laugh, in accordance with their roles as funnyhouse guards, at Sarah’s bewilderment and failure to distinguish herself from her historical reflections. Additionally, Funnyhouse of a Negro demonstrates global citizenship from multiple perspectives: as Africans, as Americans, as women, and as women of color. These patients practise the opposite of primitive animism—they infuse all living things with the quality of death.” In support of this theory, the old woman splits herself into two “objects” which forebode death: the detached mouth and its silent, hooded auditor. Web. She looked like a white woman. He represents Sarah’s father—the dark side of her heritage and her self-hatred. Some believe that she is a light-skinned African American, while others are of the opinion that she is white. At other times Raymond becomes in her mind a huge grotesque amusement park funnyman who, together with her white landlady, mocks her and fills the funnyhouse world with contemptuous laughter. Hair also links scenes and illustrates Sarah’s inevitable fate. Patrice Lumumba, an African nationalist leader, was the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (subsequently Zaire); he was assassinated shortly after being forced out of office. . Sarah’s relationship to hair is more complicated than the other characters since Funnyhouse takes place primarily in her mind. Jesus is a hunchback, a dwarf, and yellow-skinned, the latter the same term Sarah uses to describe herself. He uses the same terms as Sarah did describing her life, but uses language that is much harsher. His head appears to be split in two with blood and tissue in [his] eyes. Outside Sarah’s room, the Landlady continues to talk. It is my vile dream to live in rooms with European antiques and my statue of Queen Victoria.”, Because Sarah is a mulatto, she cannot wear the masks of both the Negro and the white woman simultaneously. Joshua Billings of The New Yorker is a prime example of the qualified praise often accorded Kennedy. She describes her father and the rape of her mother. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/funnyhouse-negro, "Funnyhouse of a Negro After Funnyhouse of a Negro won the Obie Award for Distinguished Play in 1964, Kennedy's work gained force not only within the Black Arts Movement but also among aspiring black female playwrights. 10 Apr. When Lumumba is introduced as “Man,” the knocking returns for the first time since the Queen and the Duchess made their initial appearance. The faces are grotesque: They look exactly alike and will wear masks or be made up to appear a whitish yellow. [7] Her hair underscores the idea Sarah tried to disavow, then kill, the African-American part of her heritage. He haunted her conception and diseased her birth, she says, and in her fantasies he returns from the jungle to find her. [3] This helps relay the theme of both mental and literal imperialism in the play, as Sarah's mind and body are violated by foreign elements. They are both bald, and express their fear surrounding the loss of hair. Style That her plays have gone unheralded and unappreciated is unfortunate, for Miss Kennedy is undoubtedly one of the foremost playwrights in America today. He also wants white friends to go with his room filled with European antiques. [2] The play also dramatizes the sexual economy of racism that constructs blacks as hypersexual and culturally deficient. Meaning of adrienne kennedy. Hair equals beauty for Sarah, and she cannot forgive her father’s legacy. In 1964, he. Furthermore, what Sarah really thinks of herself is also not clear. Jesus decides to hunt down and kill Patrice Lumumba. She speaks objectively and emotionlessly about herself and seems detached from her past even as she recreates it, never mentioning the noose on her neck or her imminent death. The most important was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This makes others into ideal or persecutory objects respectively, and focuses on treating others as objects rather than as a unified whole. Sarah’s mother is the only female character inside Sarah’s mind who fully retains her hair. Plot Summary This also ties into Sarah's obsession with her hair. The action takes the form of separate scenes made up of monologues, dialogues, or pantomimes, and identical grotesque figures dressed up in cheap white satin also move across the stage, sometimes shouting, sometimes screaming, carrying their bald skulls before them. Many of the ideas in Funnyhouse of a Negro are expressed by numerous symbols and images. For example, Sarah’s room is dominated by a statue of Queen Victoria, a white ideal of purity and royalty that she will never be able to match. 374–84. These characters, “SARAH, ULTIMATELY POWERLESS TO RECONCILE AND INTEGRATE HER CONFLICTING SELVES AND INCONGRUENT HISTORICAL NARRATIVES, CHOOSES TO ABANDON THE WHITE FUNNYHOUSE. It is an alabaster face, the skin drawn tightly over the high cheekbones, great dark eyes that seem gouged out of the head, a high forehead, a full red mouth and a head of frizzy hair. "Funnyhouse of a Negro Yet in choosing them, she effectively erases them, stripping their identities and their pasts. The central character of Ohio State Murders, Suzanne Alexander, appeared in several subsequent plays. Through the persona of Lumumba, Sarah claims that she killed her father. Characters He also relates a version of how Sarah’s mother’s hair fell out until she was bald. Funnyhouse of a Negro : a play in one act / Bibliographic Details; Main Author: Kennedy, Adrienne. Rather than absorbing the Queen’s and Duchess’s personalities into herself, she has projected herself onto them. It links us across a horizon and connects us to the world. "[5] He then says that her father never actually hanged himself, but rather, he is a doctor and married to a white woman, living the life that Sarah dreamed of having. His mother wanted him to go to Africa and save the race, while his father told him that "the race was no damn good. Funnyhouse of a Negro book. The Queen and Duchess embody Anglo-American culture and are a manifestation of Sarah's white self. If … The play also dramatizes the sexual economy of racism that constructs blacks as hypersexual and culturally deficient. Does it help define who you are? The persona of Patrice Lumumba, whom Sarah both adopts and associates with her father, differs from the first two in that he is black and carries rather than wears his ebony mask. Nonetheless, she spends her days writing poetry that imitates Edith Sitwell’s and dreaming of living in a white, European culture. He lost his hair too. A wall drops, and Sarah’s room is revealed. The first scene is between Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Hapsburg, with Sarah's room representing the Queen's chambers. Brown follows this same line of reasoning [in “For the Characters Are Myself: Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro”]: “If [Sarah] has chosen Victoria and the Duchess of Hapsburg to escape the sense of powerlessness, she has also chosen them, we suspect, to escape the implication of debased sexuality attached to a Black girl.” Curb corroborates these theories, writing of all Kennedy’s characters: “They are mentally and emotionally torn between their real external Black selves and the glorious dream White selves which they imagine and desire.” And Werner Sollors further develops the distinctions between the black and white selves and finds the selves “in sharp, deadly conflict” [in “Owls and Rats in the American Funnyhouse: Adrienne Kennedy’s drama”]: [Kennedy] portrays her central character not as unified or whole but as a collage of multifaceted and contradictory selves (who are not only black and white, or male and female, but also father’s daughter and mother’s daughter, ruler and martyr, stoic and revolutionary, dead and alive, carnal and spiritual, young and old, hairy and bald, glamorous and humble, or proper and lascivious). “ Playing with herselves, ” she says, and its set and props to evoke the mixed cultures represented! 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