Adrienne Kennedy - He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays

Every playwright writing today writes in Adrienne Kennedys shadow, full stop.

BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS

He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box is small, brief, gnomic, and darkly mysterious Welcome to the mind of Adrienne Kennedy, the poet who refracts all of world history and its attendant cultural artifacts through the prism of the American shame, racism, and the personal agonies it has visited on generations of individuals Every line of Kennedys speech is drenched in blood and tears, and toil and sweat are never far from its surface. The effect is unnerving and dizzying, guaranteedas Kennedys plays are always guaranteedto trouble the mind for weeks on end.

MICHAEL FEINGOLD, VILLAGE VOICE

Adriennes language transports the reader into the vibrating consciousness of a woman whose heart we can feel beating and whose mind we feel branching poetically from her core. He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box is a landscape of the mindunconventionally aligning people, places, things, and time periods in a dreamlike fashion, never taking a straight path from one event to another if a more beautiful route is available. Its a wandering, time-traveling, ecstatic celebration of internal life and the poetics of the mind. And it is a testament to the universal empathy that arises from the seeds of extreme specificity of experience.

NATALIE PORTMAN

One of the American theaters greatest and least compromising experimentalists Kennedys dramas are sites of living history, where personal stories of racisms unhealed wounds mingle with dark tales thieved from the Brothers Grimm and 1940s Hollywood.

BEN BRANTLEY, NEW YORK TIMES

Adrienne Kennedys work is a lighthouse, a liberating beacon reminding me that no structure, no mode of expression or subject matter is off limits to me as a dramatist.

ALESHEA HARRIS

Kennedy is an American avant-garde master He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box is small and slippery, consisting of onionskin strata: literary references, cinematic echoes, and long runs of remembered (or invented) family history. Its simultaneously dense and feather lightthe surface is a made-for-the-movies tragic romance, full of wistfulness and charm, yet below lies layer after layer of American violence Watching it is like sitting next to the playwright as she points to photographs, mixing stories from her favorite films with tales from her familys past It has a way of slipping into the far back of your mind. After a week, youll be able to imagine that it was whispered to you, or even that you made it up yourself. It only took me a day before I dreamed of the green glass box. It was then I felt Id seen the show for real.

HELEN SHAW, 4COLUMNS

While many of Ms. Kennedys inferiors received top prizes for blame-the-victim literature and theater, she came up with Sleep Deprivation Chamber (with son Adam P. Kennedy) in 1996. In my opinion, this play is one of the most powerful indictments of the racist criminal-justice system yet penned Black writers like Adrienne Kennedy are not there to coddle, or to comfort. They challenge us. They contest official lies. For them, truth is more important than a dubious fame, and they are willing to offend white nationalists whether they be present in politics or culture.

ISHMAEL REED

Whenever I encounter an Adrienne Kennedy play, it explodes my brain and challenges me in ways that I dream of my own work doing to others There are not many artists who when mentioned an almost silent reverence is heard. Her voice changes the molecules of the theater space like none other and has been a beacon to me as I continue to find my own.

ROBERT OHARA

A true poet of the theater, Adriennes incantatory mixture of myth, personal experiences, and delight in language has created an individual and indelible body of work.

MICHAEL KAHN

and Other Plays

OTHER BOOKS BY ADRIENNE KENNEDY

PUBLISHED BY TCG

People Who Led to My Plays

Sleep Deprivation Chamber

With Adam P. Kennedy

and Other Plays

Adrienne Kennedy

THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUP

NEW YORK

2020

He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays is copyright 2020
by Adrienne Kennedy

He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side, and Almost Eighty are copyright 2020 by Adrienne Kennedy; Mom, How Did You Meet The Beatles? is copyright 2020 by Adrienne Kennedy and Adam P. Kennedy; the Foreword is copyright 2020 by Margo Jefferson; Unraveling the Landscape: An Interview with Adrienne Kennedy is reprinted by permission of Theatre for a New Audience and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 Eighth Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10018-4156

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that this material, being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, is subject to a royalty. All rights, including but not limited to, professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of this book by educational institutions, permission for which must be secured from the publisher.

The publication of He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays by Adrienne Kennedy, through TCGs Book Program, is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

TCG books are exclusively distributed to the book trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution.

Library of Congress Control Numbers:

2020013460 (print) / 2020013461 (ebook)

ISBN 978-1-55936-965-7 (paperback) / ISBN 978-1-55936-928-2 (ebook)

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Book design and composition by Lisa Govan

Cover design by Studiousher

First Edition, September 2020

by Margo Jefferson

by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

by the Author

By Margo Jefferson

A drienne Kennedy makes intricate, incandescent art from the charged materials of our family, racial, sexual, and psychological lives. Intimate secrets and desires unfold on vast cultural landscapes. A day in a single life becomes a day that will live in historical infamy. The spaces that contain her plays are haunted. Public or privatehouses, museums, theaters, parks, train stationsthey have witnessed life, death, and every kind of passion. They contain memories that cant be plastered over, rerouted or torn down. Thats why, even on the page, her stage directions are like site-specific artworks.