Adrienne Kennedy

Adrienne Kennedy (born September 13, 1931) is an American playwright. Quotes Oh, the stories—those are an amalgam. I don’t think she would’ve defined herself like that, but my mother was a great storyteller. She always held me captive. She smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes, and she’d always say, “Adrienne, I wanna tell you something.” She is just all over my whole writing career. And my father, because he gave speeches. Really, everything I write is a kind of mixture of his speeches, and her telling me all these stories about Georgia. On how her parents inspired the stories that she writes in “Unraveling the Landscape: A Conversation With Adrienne Kennedy” in American Theatre (September 2019) To me, they’re the greatest generation. My parents and their friends, to me, have qualities that I don’t have, my children don’t have. They’re very imaginative, hardworking people. They created so much. My mother could teach all day, and then she could come home and cook a perfect dinner, and her house always looked perfect. They had qualities, I think, that are just so admirable. On her parents in “Unraveling the Landscape: A Conversation With Adrienne Kennedy” in American Theatre (September 2019) I have to totally credit that to my mother. There were two children. I was the only girl. And she just always talked to me. She would tell me things that happened to her … her dreams, her past … it’s like the monologues in my plays, it really is. Because her stories were loaded with imagery and tragedy, darkness and sarcasm and humor… On how her mother’s influence appears in her works in “Adrienne Kennedy by Suzan-Lori Parks” in BOMB Magazine (1996 Jan 1) The world is always in a turmoil over skin color. The hatred that people feel, I’m not able to articulate it. On how she feels unable to fully articulate racism in “Adrienne Kennedy Talks About Her Life” in The Village Voice (2008 Jan 29) External links Category:Playwrights from the United States Category:1931 births Category:Educators from the United States Category:Living people Category:Guggenheim Fellows Category:Harvard University faculty Category:Princeton University faculty Category:Stanford University faculty Category:University of California, Berkeley faculty Category:Yale University faculty Category:Brown University faculty Category:20th-century poets from the United States Category:Women authors from the United States Category:20th-century African-American women Category:Women academics from the United States Category:American Book Award winners