 Adrienne Kennedy
Award winning playwright and former Harvard Lecturer Adrienne Kennedy playwriting script consultant.
 Mom how did you meet the Beatles?
A true story of London in the 1960's
Kennedy Publishing
People were waiting to see Laurence Olivier and to see the Beatles. Laurence Olivier was holding my arm. Laurence Olivier led me to my seat. When the play started… …he took my hand…Adrienne from Cleveland…I was out of it. I could have had cut my head off…I was sitting next to Laurence Olivier.
He (John Lennon) said something like, “How ya doing?” And I said to him, “This is my son, Adam.” And he said, “Hi, my son Adam.” And his eyes…he had these eyes that were blazing.
We walked in and Paul McCartney was sitting on a desk. I’ll never forget it. And automatically, he picked you up and put you on his lap and just started to talk to you.
The man Jimmy (James Earl Jones) had brought to visit was Alex Haley. He came up the stairs full of energy, carrying books under his arm. He sat on a gray silk couch and we talked about young marriages, which we both had experienced. He told me that he was writing a book that would trace his ancestors back to West Africa.
Sleep Deprivation Chamber 
Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
Sleep Deprivation Chamber is a semi-autobiographical play written by Adam P. Kennedy and Adrienne Kennedy. The main character enters a sleep-deprived state in which her world becomes increasingly surrealistic. Realistic scenes are side by side with images from the character's childhood. The play has been described as a dreamlike meditation on race, truth and justice.
Teddy, a young African American, was stopped late at night by the police less than a block from his Arlington, Va., home. Without provocation, the policeman brutally beat and arrested him, charging him with assault and battery. The Kennedys interweave his trial with the mother's poignant letters in his defense and her remembrances of growing up in the 1940s, when her parents sought "to make Cleveland a better place for Negroes."
Intersecting Boundaries 
The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy
Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, editors
Although Adrienne Kennedy's plays are highly regarded in the world of American theater, this is the first major critical study of her work. Topics covered encompass all of Kennedy's writing for the theater and explore her innovative dramaturgy in the context of its intersections with African, modern, postmodern, and contemporary drama, African-American consciousness, and feminist theory in theater. In addition to examining the incredible variety of Kennedy's work and suggesting critical strategies that will support fuller study of her dramatic writing, Intersecting Boundaries demonstrates that only through a collage of critical models can the complexity and richness of her postmodern dramaturgy be illumined. Interviews with persons directly involved in the productions of Kennedy's work emphasize the central role theater artists have had in shaping her plays--ultimately suggesting useful approaches for the production of these compelling dramas.
 People who led to my plays
Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher, New York
From Publishers Weekly
As the bittersweet recollections of a young black growing up in Ohio in the 1940s, aspiring to be a famous writer, this scrapbook suffers from its deliberately fragmented format. Kennedy, whose Funnyhouse of a Negro won a 1964 Obie Award, seems to be adapting here the nonlinear style of her avant-garde plays. Hundreds of very short, titled entries ("Junior High," "My Father," "Paul Robeson," "Frank Sinatra") add up to a jumbled self-portrait of a writer slowly finding her direction. She also presents a compendium of creative artists, famous people, friends and relatives who in any way influenced her work. We get scores of brief entries on Bette Davis, Marlon Brando, Beethoven, Richard Wright, Jackson Pollock, Chopin, Duke Ellington, Socrates and dozens more. Readers with an abiding interest in Kennedy's dramatic output may find this encyclopedic approach worth the effort. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The Alexander Plays 
Minnesota Press
The Alexander Plays continues the publication of Adrienne Kennedy's collected one-act plays that was begun by the University of Minnesota Press with In One Act. This volume consists of two plays (She Talks to Beethoven and The Ohio State Murders) and a monologue (The Film Club). Each shares the central figure of a prominent writer--Suzanne Alexander. Through Alexander's reflections and recollections, Kennedy contests the conventional boundaries of narrative structure and raises new questions about form and character.
 Deadly Triplets
A Theatre Mystery and Journal
The highly experimental nature of Adrienne Kennedy's plays transformed the landscape of Black American theatre in the past two decades and yet, oddly, left her on the periphery of her field, often feeling like an uninvited guest. Infused with colliding images of torment and tranquillity, violence and peace, horror and beauty, her surrealistic dramas open a window into her own life. "The characters are myself," she has said, the condensed expression of a theatrical mind that integrates diverse autobiographical, political, and aesthetic images into a uniquely personal narrative.
Although a decided departure from her plays, Deadly Triplets: A Theatre Mystery and Journal is the logical extension of Kennedy's work—equally experimental, equally compelling. The book, as the title suggests, consists of two separate, yet integrally liked, entities. The "Theatre Mystery" (fiction) and "Theatre Journal" (nonfiction) exist simultaneously, mirror images of each other. Both are enshrouded with the same sense of mystery, silence, and eternity, presenting thickening layers of images rather than progressive action to develop their story: an interior monologue that sees the character as author coming to terms with the life of the author as character.
Adrienne Kennedy's play A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White was recently anthologized in The Norton Anthology of American Literature.
 The Adrienne Kennedy Reader
Adrienne Kennedy
Introduction by Werner Sollors
An essential collection of works by one of our greatest living playwrights.
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 works "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 Collection.
One First Edition signed hardcover People Who Led To My Plays with a packet of six unpublished photographs. Price $1,000.
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