Passed Over: The Tragic Mulatta and Integration of Identity in Adrienne Kennedy's Plays - Dis - Critical Essay

Much recent interest in the drama of Adrienne Kennedy has been spawned by the publication of her innovative autobiography People Who Led to My Plays (1987), the 1992 Great Lakes festival devoted to her work, and the recent productions of her plays by the Signature Theatre Company, which devoted an entire season to her work. Yet Kennedy has yet to receive the widespread critical attention she deserves as one of the most unique and innovative twentieth-century American playwrights. [1] Compared to August Wilson, who has garnered many accolades and is fast replacing Lorraine Hansberry as the African American playwright whose work is anthologized, taught, and critiqued, Kennedy's work is still relatively unknown by the average theatergoer, and even by some academics. And while critics praise August Wilson's use of African beliefs in the supernatural and the presence of the ancestors, these very elements are present in Kennedy's earliest plays from the 1960s. Wilson's characteristic themes-the inexorable legacy of history, the tenuous line between dream and reality, memory as a (re)constructive process, and the conflicting forces in identity formation-were addressed by Kennedy over a decade earlier. It bears asking, then, why Kennedy's work has been largely ignored until recently, and her message, a message grounded in the politics of oppression, often overlooked.

Kennedy ascribes her limited critical success to the fact that her plays are "abstract poems" (Diamond, "Interview" 157) and thus do not easily fit into an American theatrical tradition dominated by realistic plays such as those of Alice Childress and Hansberry. I contend, however, that Kennedy's lack of widespread popularity can be more accurately attributed to her uncanny ability to make audiences feel ill at ease through her dramatization of the politics of identity and, in particular, of miscegenation. As she admits at the end of her interview with Elin Diamond, "My plays make people uncomfortable so I've never had a play done in Cleveland [her hometown], never" (157). The volatile content of Kennedy's plays-her (not so) standard theme of a history of racial and sexual abuse leading to fragmentation and even death-does not make her plays either light viewing or reading. In effect, Kennedy's painful exploration of miscegenation through a fragmented, postmodern form challenges and even assaults her audienc e, revealing both her riveting power as a writer as well as the grounds upon which her work has been passed over by her contemporaries, critics, and scholars alike.

By tackling the taboo topic of miscegenation and representing it in both the form and content of her plays, Kennedy represents the African American struggle against both external and internal oppression. In her plays, which she has described as "states of mind" (qtd. in Cohn 108), Kennedy shows the self in dialogue not only with society but also with the fragmentary vestiges of otherness within the self, those internalized markers of oppression. Kennedy thus creates psychic landscapes in which the ongoing battle between conflicting discourses and mythologies is made manifest through symbols, composite characters, and a plurality of voices, all of which reveal the violent struggle between whiteness and blackness within as well as outside the self.

The political nature of this violent struggle between whiteness and blackness represented in Kennedy's early work has been misunderstood, at best, by many critics, who argued during the sixties and seventies that her plays were not didactic, as proponents of the Black Arts Movement expected and desired. Writing at a time when, as Amiri Baraka explains, most African American writers sought to portray "black heroes, not black victims" (233), Kennedy created protagonists who attempt to pass as white, although she certainly does not condone this passing. On the contrary, she reveals that her protagonists ultimately reject their blackness, a core part of their identities, in favor of a deadening and deathly whiteness. Her plays thus represent the battle between blackness and whiteness, an arena of violent racial warfare that occurs within the psyches of her characters and represents the struggles of African Americans against oppression.

Indeed, Kennedy effectively politicizes the private world of her protagonists to reveal the fragmented consciousness that results from living as a "minority" in a society dominated by whiteness and white cultural standards of beauty and value. Her writing thus reveals the deleterious effects of her protagonists' efforts to pass for white and becomes profoundly political in its revision of the tragic mulatta. Kennedy's tragic mulatta does not suffer from the mighty drop of Black blood as do the light-skinned literary heroines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but rather from her attempt to escape the African American part of her heritage in favor of a whiteness that, in Kennedy's ceuvre, does nothing less than kill.