TCG Books recently published a new collection of plays, He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays by Obie Award-winning playwright Adrienne Kennedy. He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box is Kennedy’s first new play in over a decade, tracing the story of an interracial love affair in the 1940s, doomed by the devastating effects of segregation.
The following is an excerpt from "
Unraveling the Landscape," an interview with Adrienne Kennedy by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, which is included in full in the book.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: How did this play emerge?
Adrienne Kennedy: I wasn’t expecting to write a play. Not in the least bit. I write loads and loads of journals, but somehow this play just emerged. Because I got angry—I was angry at my grandson’s high school in Virginia. It so reminded me of Ohio State in the fifties, and that made me very angry.
What was going on with your grandson’s high school?
Well, there were few Black kids, and they seemed to stand out, in an uncomfortable way that I remember. I just couldn’t believe that they were going through the same thing, basically, that I went through at Ohio State. They felt very isolated.
I love stories about plays that just sort of “show up.” Did this emerge out of that journaling practice, or did it arrive fully formed as a play?
The room in my son’s house faces all these trees, and I’m just staring at all these trees—and I have loads of photographs. My mother kept all these photographs. I found a photograph of her boarding school, at a place called Fort Valley, Georgia. She talked about that boarding school constantly. It’s very Victorian-looking. It reminded me of the Brontës. So that was a big inspiration. And I spent six summers in Georgia when I was a kid. We lived in Cleveland, but I spent six summers in Georgia, visiting my grandmother. And I’ve never been able to unravel that town, and all those relationships.
What amazes me is that I tend to think about the same things I’ve thought about all my life, and I always try to unravel those things. I just had another go at trying to unravel that town, and those six summers, and that’s really what it is.
I think that all of the plays you’ve written since Ohio State Murders have been wrestling very beautifully with this idea of remembrance. I especially love the kind of Gothic qualities of this new play: There are stories within stories, and images within images. Is memory a thing that you think a lot about?
Oh, I do. I do think about the past a lot. I think about my parents a lot, because I realized how unusual they were. My father was a social worker, he was a Y secretary. My mother was a schoolteacher, she taught fifth-grade science. I think you have to get older before you realize—they put so much energy into me. And they were so concerned about me. So I think about that a lot.
Are the characters in this piece based on anyone from your life, or are they all fiction? Or are they kind of an amalgam? I hate that question, but I’m always curious. The kinds of stories that are haunting them—the stories they’re telling—feel so vivid.
The stories—those are an amalgam. I don’t think she would’ve defined herself like that, but my mother was a great storyteller. She always held me captive. She smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes, and she’d always say, “Adrienne, I wanna tell you something.” She is just all over my whole writing career. And my father, because he gave speeches. Really, everything I write is a kind of mixture of his speeches and her telling me all these stories about Georgia.
It’s interesting that you say you’re always writing about your parents. I think every writer, probably, in some way, is doing that. Trying to unravel the mystery of your immediate origins. Do you feel close to your characters’ generation?
Well, my father is born in 1904. My mother is born in 1907, and they were born right down the road from each other. They went to Morehouse, and Atlanta University, around 1930. To me, they’re the greatest generation. My parents and their friends, to me, have qualities that I don’t have, my children don’t have. They’re very imaginative, hard-working people. They created so much. My mother could teach all day, and then she could come home and cook a perfect dinner, and her house always looked perfect. They had qualities, I think, that are just so admirable.
What has the theater meant to you? What does it mean to you now?
I fell in love with the theater when I was sixteen and I saw The Glass Menagerie. Tennessee Williams still remains very, very important to me. Lorca is my favorite playwright, really. My husband was a grad student, and we came to New York in 1955. I love the theater of the fifties, the musicals of the fifties. I haven’t been to the theater in years. And I don’t consider myself a playwright, because I haven’t had very many pleasant experiences when I’ve had my plays put on. I feel the best about scholars—the academic world. They xeroxed my plays and kept them alive. But I don’t really like the theater that much, from my experiences when I’ve had plays put on.
I see myself as a writer. I’m a scribbler, I really am. I’ve been scribbling since I was six years old. I’ve written a lot of things that I’ve thrown away, I’ve written lots of things that will never see the light of day. Occasionally, I’ve had these plays up. But I owe almost everything to the academic world. Because I taught for so long, I understand that. I would always teach Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, I would always teach The Seagull. I understand the love of plays, the love of literature. That’s really what I love.
Maybe the better version of the question is: What does it mean to you to write plays?
I see, I know what you’re saying. I think I still owe it to The Glass Menagerie. Because when I saw that—we seemed to be an ideal family, but my parents had loads and loads of problems, and subsequently got a divorce. And when I saw The Glass Menagerie and I saw those people—even today, right this very morning, if I saw The Glass Menagerie, I would start weeping, weeping. It’s those people, living in their living room, with all their problems. That inspired me so much. Death of a Salesman also. I might owe something to my Ohio State drama teacher, who gave me an A—the only A I ever got at Ohio State, practically. Because she said, “You really understand plays.” So I was reaching for what people had said. All through my twenties, I wrote constantly. I went to the New School, I went to the American Theater Wing. When I went on a trip to Africa, we were out of the country thirteen months, and that’s when I wrote Funnyhouse of a Negro. And the monologues that I had written in Ghana, and the monologues that I wrote in Rome—I realized that they had something. It was the landscape: the landscape of Ghana, the landscape of West Africa, and the landscape of Rome.
A version of this interview originally appeared in an issue of Theatre for a New Audience’s 360° Viewfinder. This version was then printed in the September 2019 issue of American Theatre magazine. Reprinted with permission from Theatre for a New Audience, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and American Theatre magazine.
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