ABSTRACT
Key to Adrienne Kennedy’s work as an absurdist dramatist is her ability to transform an ancient African legacy of ancestor worship into a radical, experimental dramaturgy. Taking the extraordinary lives of her parents, Etta Hawkins, a teacher, and her father, Cornell Wallace Hawkins, a social worker, who spent most of their lives doing everything they could to advance black lives and culture, Kennedy has woven a non-linear, non-traditional, highly experimental tapestry of African American memory, which, despite the inherent darkness and pain of Jim Crow, system racism, and an ongoing erasure of black lineage and culture, has inspired generations of writers. While other black authors have come to this painful terrorscape in a polemic, Kennedy uses a seamless, disconcerting method of breaking down the world of systemic racism through an approach that displaces traditional modes of narrative and drama, autobiography and fiction; thus in this essay, my approach to her plays takes a phenomenological response to her work, trying to get at the dream-like quality of her absurdist technique, with a focus on her most recent collection, He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays published in 2020, the year of our recent Covid Plague.
