Adrienne Kennedy has been an important figure in the American theatre since the early 1960s, influencing generations of playwrights. She is a three-time Obie-award winning playwright, including Funnyhouse of a Negro in 1964 and June and Jean in Concert in 1996. Among Kennedy's many honors are the American Academy of Arts and Letters award and the Guggenheim fellowship. She has been commissioned to write works for the Public Theater, Jerome Robbins, the Royal Court Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum and Juilliard. In 1995-1996, Signature Theatre Company dedicated its entire season to presenting her works. Kennedy has been a visiting professor at Yale University, Princeton, Brown University, the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University. Kennedy attended Ohio State University and received an honorary doctorate in 2003 in recognition of the 50th anniversary of her graduation.
An elegiac wisp of a memory play by Adrienne Kennedy that reflects the all-too-frequent tragedy resulting from interracial love in the Jim Crow-era American South.--Thom Geier The Wrap Ms. Kennedy remains one the harshest -- and most invaluable -- of the American theater's conflicted sentimentalists.--Ben Brantley New York Times One of the American theater's greatest and least compromising experimentalists... Her dramas are sites of living history, where personal stories of racism's unhealed wounds mingle with dark tales thieved from the Brothers Grimm and 1940s Hollywood.-- New York Times People will be reading [her] work for centuries to come.-- Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The effect is unnerving and dizzying, guaranteed -- as Kennedy's plays are always guaranteed -- to trouble the mind for weeks on end.--Michael Feingold Village Voice