He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays
Adrienne Kennedy
(Author)
Description
One of the American theater's greatest and least compromising experimentalists...Her dramas are sites of living history, where personal stories of racism's unhealed wounds mingle with dark tales thieved from the Brothers Grimm and 1940s Hollywood.--Alexis Soloski, New York Times
In the titular play of this remarkable collection, Adrienne Kennedy journeys into Georgia and New York City in the 1940s to lay bare the devastating effects of segregation and its aftermath. He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box is the story of a doomed interracial love affair unfolds through fragmented pieces--letters, recollections from family members, songs from the time--to present a multifaceted view of our cultural history that resists simple interpretation. This volume also includes Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side and Mom, How Did You Meet The Beatles?, cowritten with her son Adam P. Kennedy.
Product Details
| Publisher | Theatre Communications Group |
| Publish Date | November 17, 2020 |
| Pages | 144 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781559369657 |
| Dimensions | 8.4 X 5.3 X 0.4 inches | 0.5 pounds |
About the Author
Adrienne Kennedy has been a fixture in the American theatre since the early 1960s, influencing generations of playwrights. She is a three-time OBIE award-winning playwright, including Funnyhouse of a Negro in 1964 and June and Jean in Concert in 1996. Among Kennedy's many honors are the American Academy of Arts and Letters award and the Guggenheim fellowship. She has been commissioned to write works for The Public Theater, Jerome Robbins, the Royal Court Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, and Juilliard. In 1995-1996, Signature Theatre Company dedicated its entire season to presenting her works. Kennedy has been a visiting professor at Yale University, Princeton, Brown University, the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University. Kennedy attended Ohio State University and received an honorary doctorate in 2003 in recognition of the 50th anniversary of her graduation.
Reviews
In He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, the landscape is as ugly as it is beautiful, its filigree shaped from barbed wire...Only Tennessee Williams summons a cultural past with such a plangent mix of rhapsody and disgust...Ms. Kennedy remains one the harshest--and most invaluable--of the American theater's conflicted sentimentalists.
--Ben Brantley, New York Times
An elegiac wisp of a memory play by Adrienne Kennedy that reflects the all-too-frequent tragedy resulting from interracial love in the Jim Crow-era American South.
--Thom Geier, The Wrap
The effect is unnerving and dizzying, guaranteed--as Kennedy's plays are always guaranteed--to trouble the mind for weeks on end.
--Michael Feingold, Village Voice
He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box is shaped like the shimmering and original scripts that made Kennedy's name in the 1960s and have kept her in a place of her own in the New York theater scene ever since.
--Hilton Als, New Yorker
People will be reading Adrienne Kennedy's work for centuries to come.
--Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
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