A Liberating Beacon

Experiencing, Personally Witnessing

Adrienne Kennedy. Those two words mean so much. First of all they mean an artist. A playwright. A black playwright. Someone who looks like me. A black female playwright. Someone who looks like the person who gave birth to me. That is so profound because as a young artist I was presented with so few black voices during my education. I had to seek them out for myself. Whenever I encounter an Adrienne Kennedy play, it explodes my brain and challenges me in ways that I dream of my own work doing to others. For me, her work is not necessarily about understanding, but rather it’s about experiencing. Personally witnessing. Listening emphatically. Standing flat-footed in a world unlike any I could have imagined and allowing her language to drown me in wonder and awe. Knocking my head up against images that cannot be shaken loose. Demanding myself to let go of an unhealthy addiction to the linear narrative. There are not many artists who when mentioned an almost silent reverence is heard. Her voice changes the molecules of the theatre space like none other and has been a beacon to me as I continue to find my own.

—Robert O’Hara, playwright and director

Landscape of the Mind

In 2018 I asked Adrienne, with whom I studied playwriting as an undergraduate, if I could read her work as part of a Boston festival I curated in which I combined music, film, and writing created by women. Adrienne graciously agreed and sent me some of her recent work, including He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, as ideas

After reading the works she sent me, I asked her: Was it acceptable for a white woman to perform words of a character written as African American? (I felt conscious of the history of whitewashing and the necessity of representation of many different types of experience, even in a non-theatrical production of her work.)

Adrienne’s response affected me: “If I had not been allowed to read aloud in class because I did