The Adrienne Kennedy Reader
The Adrienne Kennedy Reader

Author: Adrienne Kennedy

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2001-08-13

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1452904855

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Introduction by Werner Sollors Adrienne Kennedy has been a force in American theatre since the early 1960s, influencing generations of playwrights with her hauntingly fragmentary lyrical dramas. Exploring the violence racism visits upon people's lives, Kennedy's plays express poetic alienation, transcending the particulars of character and plot through ritualistic repetition and radical structural experimentation. Frequently produced, read, and taught, they continue to hold a significant place among the most exciting dramas of the past fifty years. This first comprehensive collection of her most important works traces the development of Kennedy's unique theatrical oeuvre from her Obie-winning Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964) through significant later works such as A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976), Ohio State Murders (1992), and June and Jean in Concert, for which she won an Obie in 1996. The entire contents of Kennedy's groundbreaking collections In One Act and The Alexander Plays are included, as is her earliest work "Because of the King of France" and the play An Evening with Dead Essex (1972). More recent prose writings "Secret Paragraphs about My Brother," "A Letter to Flowers," and "Sisters Etta and Ella" are fascinating refractions of the themes and motifs of her dramatic works, even while they explore new material on teaching and writing. An introduction by Werner Sollors provides a valuable overview of Kennedy's career and the trajectory of her literary development. Adrienne Kennedy (b. 1931) is a three-time Obie-award winning playwright whose works have been widely performed and anthologized. Among her many honors are the American Academy of Arts and Letters award and the Guggenheim fellowship. In 1995-6, the Signature Theatre Company dedicated its entire season to presenting her work. She has been commissioned to write works for the Public Theater, Jerome Robbins, the Royal Court Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, and Juilliard, and she has been a visiting professor at Yale, Princeton, Brown, the University of California at Berkeley, and Harvard. She lives in New York City.

She Talks to Beethoven
She Talks to Beethoven

Author: Adrienne Kennedy

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 21

ISBN-13: 9780573703959

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Set in Ghana, Suzanne waits in her room listening to radio broadcasts about her husband who has mysteriously disappeared while she attempts to write about and communicate with composer Ludwig van Beethoven. Her world is infiltrated by snatches of Ghanaian string music, the revolutionary words of Frantz Fanon and strains of Beethoven's Fidelio. Suzanne, recovering from an unspecified illness hovers in displaced time and space fluctuating between Vienna, Austria, in 1803, and Accra, Ghana, in 1961.

Women in Music
Women in Music

Author: Karin Pendle

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-09-19

Total Pages: 643

ISBN-13: 1135384630

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First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.

African American Women Playwrights
African American Women Playwrights

Author: Christy Gavin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-10-12

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 113652147X

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This Guide includes the primary and secondary works and summaries of plays of 15 prominent African American women playwrights including Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy, Alice Childress, Zora Neale Hurston, Georgia Douglas Johnson. During the last 10 to 15 years, critical consideration of contemporary as well as earlier black women playwrights has blossomed. Plays by black women are increasingly anthologized and two recently published anthologies devote themselves solely to black women dramatists. In light of the growing interest in scholarship concerning African American women playwrights, researchers and librarians need a bibliographical source that brings together the profiles interviews, critical material and primary sources of black female playwrights. This guide will provide a bibliographical essay reviewing the scholarship of black women playwrights as well as for each playwright: a biography, summaries of each play detailed annotations of secondary material, and list of primary sources.

Unmaking Mimesis
Unmaking Mimesis

Author: Elin Diamond

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780415012287

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In Unmaking Mimesis Elin Diamond interrogates the concept of mimesis in relation to feminism, theatre and performance. She combines psychoanalytic, semiotic and materialist strategies with readings of selected plays by writers as diverse as Ibsen, Brecht, Aphra Behn, Caryl Churchill and Peggy Shaw. Through a series of provocative readings of theatre, theory and feminist performance she demonstrates the continuing force of feminism and mimesis in critical thinking today. Unmaking Mimesis will interest theatre scholars and performance and cultural theorists, for all of whom issues of text, representation and embodiment are of compelling concern.

Peculiar Passages
Peculiar Passages

Author: Carol Allen

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 9780820476193

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This book features African American women playwrights from 1875 to 2000, with an emphasis on the late nineteenth century, a period rarely treated in regard to women's drama. Highlighting the lesser-known Pauline Hopkins, Angelina Weld Grimké, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Eulalie Spence, and May Miller, and the well-known Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Childress, Adrienne Kennedy, and Ntozake Shange, Peculiar Passages argues that these playwrights' efforts define a tradition characterized by quick-change mobility, sensitivity to vernacular forms, and dedication to intertextual dialogue. Situating the plays within a broader context, the book also connects them to minstrelsy, the Passion Play, and the Black Arts Movement.

Contemporary African American Female Playwrights
Contemporary African American Female Playwrights

Author: Dana A. Williams

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 1998-06-30

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 0313064954

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Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was a major dramatic success and brought to the world's attention the potential talent of African American women playwrights. But in spite of Hansberry's landmark contribution, both the theater and the literary world have often failed to include contemporary African American female playwrights within the circle of production, publication, and criticism. In African American drama anthologies, female playwrights are seldom given the degree of attention that is accorded their male counterparts. And because of space constraints, anthologies of works by women playwrights are forced to exclude numerous female dramatists, including African Americans. Meanwhile, some scholars have argued that the works of African American female playwrights are seldom produced in the mainstream theater because these plays frequently challenge the views of white America. But as A Raisin in the Sun demonstrates, plays by African American women dramatists can have a powerful message and are worthy of attention. A comprehensive research tool, this annotated bibliography sheds light on the often neglected works of contemporary African American female playwrights. Included within its scope are those dramatists who have had at least one work published since 1959, the year of Hansberry's monumental achievement. The first section provides a listing of anthologies that include one or more plays written by an African American female dramatist. The second gives entries for reference works and for scholarly and critical studies of the dramatists and their plays. The third presents a listing of published plays by individual dramatists, along with a summary of each drama; the works of each playwright that are related to drama; and secondary sources that treat the dramatists and their plays. Entries are accompanied by concise but informative annotations, and the volume closes with a list of periodicals that frequently publish criticism of African American female playwrights, a section of brief biographical sketches of the dramatists, and extensive indexes.

Beat Drama
Beat Drama

Author: Deborah Geis

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-07-28

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1472567897

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Readers and acolytes of the vital early 1950s-mid 1960s writers known as the Beat Generation tend to be familiar with the prose and poetry by the seminal authors of this period: Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima, and many others. Yet all of these authors, as well as other less well-known Beat figures, also wrote plays-and these, together with their countercultural approaches to what could or should happen in the theatre-shaped the dramatic experiments of the playwrights who came after them, from Sam Shepard to Maria Irene Fornes, to the many vanguard performance artists of the seventies. This volume, the first of its kind, gathers essays about the exciting work in drama and performance by and about the Beat Generation, ranging from the well-known Beat figures such as Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, to the “Afro-Beats” - LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Bob Kaufman, and others. It offers original studies of the women Beats - Di Prima, Bunny Lang - as well as groups like the Living Theater who in this era first challenged the literal and physical boundaries of the performance space itself.

Black Theatre
Black Theatre

Author: Paul Carter Harrison

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 2002-11-08

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1566399440

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Generating a new understanding of the past—as well as a vision for the future—this path-breaking volume contains essays written by playwrights, scholars, and critics that analyze African American theatre as it is practiced today.Even as they acknowledge that Black experience is not monolithic, these contributors argue provocatively and persuasively for a Black consciousness that creates a culturally specific theatre. This theatre, rooted in an African mythos, offers ritual rather than realism; it transcends the specifics of social relations, reaching toward revelation. The ritual performance that is intrinsic to Black theatre renews the community; in Paul Carter Harrison's words, it "reveals the Form of Things Unknown" in a way that "binds, cleanses, and heals."