Funnyhouse of a Negro by Adrienne Kennedy

First produced: 1962, at the Circle-in-the-Square Theater, New York, New York

First published: 1969

Type of work: Play

Type of plot: Surrealistic

Time of work: Mid-1960’s

Locale: New York, New York

Principal Characters:

• Sarah (Negro), a student at a city college in New York
• Duchess of Hapsburg, a psychic projection of Sarah’s divided mind
• Queen Victoria Regina, another extension of Sarah’s mind
• Jesus, yet another projection of Sarah’s mind
• Patrice Lumumba, the fourth of Sarah’s selves
• The Mother, a dreamlike figure who represents Sarah’s image of her own mother, who was white
• The Landlady (Funnyhouse Lady), the white woman who runs the rooming house in which Sarah lives
• Raymond (Funnyhouse Man), Sarah’s boyfriend, a white Jewish poet

The Play

Funnyhouse of a Negro is the dreamlike enactment of Sarah’s internal struggle over who she is and where she belongs. Although many of the specific incidents in this one-act play are drawn from Adrienne Kennedy’s own life, the drama attempts, through the poetry of word and image, to enlarge these very personal conflicts and to make them relevant to problems in the culture at large. The style of this play is surrealistic, expressionistic, and absurdist. The plot of the play should not, therefore, be regarded as a credible or realistic story, nor should readers attempt to make literal sense of the dialogue or visual effects.

Although the play offers different specific settings such as Sarah’s room, the stair-case of the rooming house, Raymond’s room, and the jungle, the action depicted takes place inside Sarah’s mind. At the same time, this play is often quite openly theatrical in its use of space. From the opening scene, which has the Mother walk out in front of the drawn curtains, to the very end, in which walls fall away and the action jumps abruptly from one part of the stage to another, readers should try to imagine how the playwright intended the fully staged work to be seen and heard by an audience.

The play begins before the curtains have even opened. The Mother crosses in front of the white curtains. As she exits, the curtains part to reveal Queen Victoria Regina and the Duchess of Hapsburg, who converse about their (that is, about Sarah’s) life. All the while, there is a persistent knocking at the door; the knocking, they say, is their father, a black man who they say is dead but who keeps returning. Both characters are made up to appear as if they are black women trying to look white. Headdresses with thick black hair attached hide the fact that both characters seem to be going bald. Abruptly, lights fade. The Mother returns, this time carrying a severed bald head and saying that the black man has defiled her.

Lights come on to reveal Sarah in her room in a rooming house on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She is wearing black, and her hair seems to be falling out. Her long monologue, delivered directly to the audience, describes her life, mixing the details of the real, external world with her troubled inner feelings. Implicit in her ramblings is her conflict between identifying with the white culture in which she has been raised and her realization that as an African American she is different from the white people whom she knows. Then, through a hole in the wall, four characters representing different parts of herself enter: the Duchess, the Queen, Jesus Christ, and Patrice Lumumba, represented as a black African whose bloody head appears to be split in two and who carries an ebony mask. Sarah addresses the audience again and in the same illogical way tries to describe who these characters are.

The Landlady (also described as the Funnyhouse Lady), who is now revealed at the foot of the rooming house staircase, seems to be talking to someone offstage about Sarah’s life. She seems aware that Sarah’s imagination has magnified the girl’s guilt about her father’s alleged suicide and has caused her delusions about who she really is. In spite of the seriousness of the subject, her speech is filled with maddened laughter.

The lights black out and rise again on a different setting, the room of Raymond, Sarah’s boyfriend, a white Jewish poet. The room is located upstairs in the same rooming house. Raymond, referred to in the scene as the Funnyhouse Man, laughs maniacally throughout his conversation with Sarah, who does not appear. Her role is played by the Duchess of Hapsburg. The two discuss Sarah’s parents: her black father, who has hanged himself, and her white mother, who has gone mad and been put into an asylum.

Again, lights black out. The knocking from earlier in the play rises, and an obscure, faceless figure carrying a mask emerges. He addresses the audience directly, talking about his fears. He says that his hair has fallen out and that this is symptomatic of an African disease. After another blackout, the scene changes to the Queen’s bedchamber, where Queen Victoria and the Duchess examine their heads for baldness. The balding Duchess attempts to take the hair she has gathered in a red paper bag and return it to her scalp. The figure from the previous scene returns. He is Patrice Lumumba, and yet, because he is in reality an extension of Sarah’s inner being, he speaks to the audience of her life and expectations, reiterating much of what Sarah mentioned earlier in the play. A bald head appears mysteriously, but his monologue continues. The various elements of his irrational rant reveal more about Sarah. She believes that she has betrayed both of her parents.

The next scene is set in the Duchess’s ballroom, where the Duchess receives Jesus, who carries the red bag of hair from the previous scene. Both are almost completely bald. After a quick blackout, the Duchess and Jesus attempt to comb their remaining hair, until the knocking at the door from earlier in the play begins once more. Both characters speak in unison about their (again, Sarah’s) father.

The scene suddenly shifts to the Landlady at the stairs. She describes Sarah’s relationship with her father and recalls a time when he came to see his daughter and the two tried unsuccessfully to reconcile. The scene then shifts again, returning to the chamber of the Duchess, where Jesus, the Duchess at his side, awakes from a deep slumber and speaks to the audience about Sarah’s inner fears and fantasies.

Following a blackout, the stage is consumed with a new set, the jungle. Here, in slow motion, the different characters who are really embodiments of Sarah’s fragmented mind emerge from the lush growth, speaking frenetically of Sarah’s father and his role in her life. The black missionary who went to Africa may be dead, but he keeps returning to haunt Sarah’s life. Her desire to destroy his memory and to obliterate both him and that part of her that he has created sends the four characters into maniacal laughter.

In a final tableau, a wall falls away to reveal a hideous statue of Queen Victoria. Nearby, Sarah’s father accosts his daughter, who is in fact hanging from a rope, dead. Raymond and the Landlady (the Funnyhouse Man and Lady) talk about Sarah’s suicide. Raymond suggests that much of what the characters have said has been invented, that Sarah’s father never killed himself, that he is alive, living somewhere in New York City.

Critical Context

From the beginning of her career, Adrienne Kennedy’s work has been viewed with great interest. Perhaps because of its imaginative use of the stage and its haunting, frightening obscurity, Funnyhouse of a Negro has remained one of her most highly regarded plays.

Early commentators tended to see Kennedy as an important African American dramatist who had begun her career at a time when many black writers were beginning to emerge in the United States. Later, she was viewed as an important female playwright who in many ways embodied and commented on the ideals of feminist thinkers. Both opinions are reflected in a variety of articles, most of which use Funnyhouse of a Negro to support their central arguments.

Kennedy has resisted defining herself as any particular type of writer, although she fully acknowledges the powerful influence of her own search for identity on her plays. Her interviews offer glimpses of a profoundly thoughtful and intuitive writer who is perhaps first and foremost a serious and gifted theater artist. Much of the later criticism, although tending to hark back to some of the political concerns of earlier commentators, focuses on the extraordinary and powerful techniques used in this play. Such techniques have led many to consider her to be an experimental playwright. The majority of Kennedy’s works have been presented, both in the United States and overseas, in small theaters, by nontraditional companies and avant-garde actors. Even though Kennedy’s work is not intended for Broadway and has had comparatively limited exposure, many critics regard Adrienne Kennedy, on the basis of Funnyhouse of a Negro and a few other plays, as one of the most important dramatists of the United States.

Bibliography

Binder, Wolfgang. “A MELUS Interview with Adrienne Kennedy.” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 12 (Fall, 1985): 99-108. An interesting discussion with the playwright on issues of race and culture as they apply to her plays and to her concerns about writing for the theater.

Blau, Herbert. “The American Dream in American Gothic: The Plays of Sam Shepard and Adrienne Kennedy.” Modern Drama 27 (December, 1984): 520-539. An important article in which the noted theater critic discusses why both Shepard and Kennedy ought to be regarded as major American playwrights. This essay has had a significant influence on virtually all later commentators on Kennedy’s work.

Bryant-Jackson, Paul K., and Lois More Overbeck, eds. Intersecting Boundaries: The Theater of Adrienne Kennedy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. A varied and comprehensive collection of essays dealing with diverse aspects of Kennedy’s works, including literary and theatrical criticism, discussion of the plays’ production histories, and several interviews with the playwright by theater scholars. A number of essays look at Funnyhouse of a Negro.

Diamond, Elin. “An Interview with Adrienne Kennedy.” Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present 4 (1989): 143-157. The playwright speaks at length about her personal and professional concerns and interests. Much of what Kennedy reveals here sheds light on the autobiographical dimension of her plays as well as on her experiences as a writer.

Kintz, Linda. The Subject’s Tragedy: Political Poetics, Feminist Theory, and Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Chapter 4, which deals with Kennedy and offers an analysis of Funnyhouse of a Negro, is especially interesting in the context of feminist politics. The author is especially adept at exploring the ways Kennedy fuses art and politics.

Kolin, Philip C. “From the Zoo to the Funnyhouse: A Comparison of Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story with Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro.” Theatre Southwest (April, 1989): 8-16. Examines and compares the two plays. Because Albee was an important influence on Kennedy (he was instrumental in the first production of Funnyhouse of a Negro), the critical connections and disparities are significant. Some of the differences between Kennedy’s use of absurdism and more traditional uses become apparent.

Meigs, Susan E. “No Place Like the Funnyhouse: The Struggle for Identity in Three Adrienne Kennedy Plays.” In Modern American Drama: The Female Canon, edited by June Schlueter. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990. A careful analysis of three of Kennedy’s plays, including Funnyhouse of a Negro, with an emphasis on the playwright’s concerns with individual and group identities.

Shinn, Thelma. “Living the Answer: The Emergence of African American Feminist Drama.” Studies in the Humanities 17 (December, 1990): 149-159. Looks at Kennedy’s plays in the context of the pioneering work of Lorraine Hansberry and the succeeding work of Ntozake Shange and other African American women dramatists. A line of development is drawn from Hansberry’s efforts through the work of the later generation of writers.

Sollors, Werner. “Owls and Rats in the American Funnyhouse.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 63 (September, 1991): 507-532. A highly useful study of several Kennedy plays, including Funnyhouse of a Negro, examining specific recurring motifs in the broad context of American culture. The author attempts to decipher some of Kennedy’s more idiosyncratic images.