Adrienne Kennedy

Adrienne Kennedy (born September 13, 1931) is an American playwright. She is best known for Funnyhouse of a Negro, which premiered in 1964 and won an Obie Award. She won a lifetime Obie as well. In 2018 she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.

In 2022, Kennedy received the Gold Medal for Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; given every six years, it has been awarded to only 16 people, including Eugene O'Neill.

Kennedy has been contributing to American theater since the early 1960s, influencing generations of playwrights with her haunting, fragmentary lyrical dramas. Exploring the violence racism brings to people's lives, Kennedy's plays express poetic alienation, transcending the particulars of character and plot through ritualistic repetition and radical structural experimentation. Much of her work explores issues of race, kinship, and violence in American society, and many of her plays are "autobiographically inspired."

Kennedy is noted for the use of surrealism in her plays, which are often plotless and symbolic, drawing on mythical, historical, and imaginary figures to depict and explore the African-American experience.

In 1969, The New York Times critic Clive Barnes wrote: "While almost every black playwright in the country is fundamentally concerned with realism—LeRoi Jones and Ed Bullins at times have something different going but even their symbolism is straightforward stuff—Miss Kennedy is weaving some kind of dramatic fabric of poetry." In 1995, critic Michael Feingold of the Village Voice wrote that, "with Samuel Beckett gone, Adrienne Kennedy is probably the boldest artist now writing for the theater." Kennedy has also written in other genres, including poetry and essays.