ABSTRACT
Writing about Adrienne Kennedy is not unlike being written by her: one feels always already estranged from any clear point of departure, though a plethora of intellectual, psychic, and political themes suggest themselves as equally plausible centering concerns. Self-narration as crisis and quenchless need; the crossings of race and gender in the construction of identity; arresting but enigmatic juxtapositions of spectacle and verbal image, echoing ruptures between various historical and cultural formations — these are among the more encompassing issues which lend Kennedy's work its characteristic aura of irresolvable disturbance. 2 The ensuing temptation for the reader trapped in this funnyhouse of textual effects is to seize upon a specific representational category or structure in order the thematize Kennedy's project from some consistent conceptual position.
