A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White by Adrienne Kennedy
"A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White" is a one-act play by Adrienne Kennedy that premiered in 1976 at the New York Shakespeare Festival. The play explores the life of a character named Clara, who grapples with feelings of isolation and disconnection from her own narrative. Set against the backdrop of classic films, the narrative intertwines Clara's experiences with scenes from notable movies, featuring iconic actors like Bette Davis and Marlon Brando. Throughout the play, Clara's interactions are mediated through these filmic representations, highlighting her struggles with marital discord, trauma, and familial relationships.
The structure of the play blurs the lines between cinematic and personal realities, showing how Clara responds to emotional turmoil by retreating into her writing. Her engagement with the films serves both as a reflection of her inner life and a commentary on the romanticized portrayals of women in Hollywood. As Clara confronts her past, she realizes that embracing her voice through writing is essential for her empowerment and authenticity. The play ultimately poses a critical examination of identity and the idea of belonging in a world shaped by media and societal expectations.
A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White by Adrienne Kennedy
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First produced: 1976 (first published, 1984)
Type of work: Play
The Work
A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White opened at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976 as a work in progress. This one-act play is introduced by the Columbia Pictures Lady speaking in Clara’s stead. Each scene is first a film set, with the leading roles played by the film’s primary actors. Places and people from Clara’s life, including Clara, who has only a bit part, appear in parallel supporting roles. In her stage directions, Kennedy describes the supporting actors’ attitudes toward the leads as “deadly serious.”
Characters in scene 1 include actors Bette Davis and Paul Henreid in a scene set on an ocean liner from the film Now, Voyager (1942); the scene simultaneously occurs in a Cleveland hospital lobby in June and July of 1955. Clara’s mother and father, as they were in a 1929 photograph, are on deck. Clara silently joins them, but she isolates herself from the action by writing in a notebook and allowing Bette Davis to speak for her of marital discord, a miscarriage, fears of bleeding to death in labor, and childhood traumas. Clara’s dominant response to emotional confrontation is to read passages from The Owl Answers, which she has apparently been writing in her notebook. As the scene ends, Clara enters her comatose brother’s hospital room and relates what she sees to the film Viva Zapata! (1952).
Scene 2, with Jean Peters and Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata!, takes place in the hospital room as well as in a wedding-night scene from Viva Zapata! and in a Now, Voyager stateroom. According to the stage directions, “there is no real separation” between the film scenes and Clara’s life at any time during the play. From the hospital/wedding-night bed, Jean Peters speaks for Clara, then rises and falls bleeding onto the bed. Marlon Brando helps her to change the black sheets, leaving the bloodied sheets on the floor. Clara’s mother and her father, now in their fifties, divorced and feuding, are present at their son’s bedside. Scene 2 ends with Clara observing her parents from the doorway as her mother explains what she knows of her son’s automobile accident.
Scene 3, with Shelley Winters and Montgomery Clift from A Place in the Sun (1951), is set in Clara’s childhood room. The scene directly reveals Clara: isolated, fearful, standing on the sidelines of her own life, living in the past, bleeding, and uncertain of the truths of her writing. Clara has filled her absence from her own life with romantic film characters she can never become. She has recognized, however, that writing is her weapon against her lack of belonging, her means of revealing her repressed, fragmented selves and transforming them into a presence with whom she can “co-exist in a true union.” If she does not successfully revolt against her embrace of Hollywood’s romanticized ideal and assume a leading role in her life, she, like the character played by Shelley Winters in the film, will drown in silence.
Bibliography
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Betsko, Kathleen, and Rachel Koenig, eds. Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987.
Brown, E. Barnsley. “Passed Over: The Tragic Mulatta and (Dis)Integration of Identity in Adrienne Kennedy’s Plays.” African American Review 35 (Summer, 2001): 281-295.
Bryant-Jackson, Paul K. “Kennedy’s Travelers in the American and African Continuum.” In Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the Africa Diaspora, edited by Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.
Bryant-Jackson, Paul K., and Lois More Overbeck, eds. Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
Diamond, Elin. “Adrienne Kennedy.” In Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996.
Harrison, Paul C., ed. Totem Voices: Plays from the Black World Repertory. New York: Grove Press, 1988.
Hurley, Erin. “Blackout: Utopian Technologies in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro.” Modern Drama 47 (Summer, 2004): 200-218.
Kennedy, Adrienne. People Who Led to My Plays. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.
Kintz, Linda. The Subject’s Tragedy: Political Poetics, Feminist Theory, and Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.
Kolin, Philip C. Understanding Adrienne Kennedy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005.