People Who Led to My Plays
Adrienne Kennedy looks back on the people and memories that shaped her work in a reflective autobiographical scrapbook. Fragments of text and photographs trace the making of an artist.
Work Information
People and memories shape the making of a playwright.
People Who Led to My Plays is an autobiographical scrapbook that traces a playwright's beginnings through memory and photographs, building a portrait of the artist from fragments.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Theatre Communications Group
- Published
- 1996-09-01
- Pages
- 144 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 17.78 x 1.02 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781559361255
- ISBN-10
- 1559361255
- Price
- 3373 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Arts & Photography/Performing Arts/Theater/Playwriting
A revealing collection of words, memories, and pictures—an autobiographical scrapbook—by an outstanding contemporary playwright. In this remarkable memoir, Adrienne Kennedy charts her life from growing up in Cleveland in the 1930s and '40s in a middle-class Black family through marriage, motherhood, and her eventual move to New York City in the '50s. Out of a sequence of deceptively spare statements emerges a complex portrait of the artist as a young woman, as she examines the people and events that compelled her to be a writer.
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
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Fascinating form and thought provoking content
This is an excellent book! If you have read any of Adrienne Kennedy's plays, you will appreciate the content. Other than reading the plays over and over, I believe this book is the most helpful in understanding her work and the sources for her inspiration. As an autobiography of sorts, it reads more like a journal, with her memories written throughout in the form of short sentences, pictures, and phrases. The form itself is fascinating- fragmented, like her plays. This book is so much more than it's content, which of course provides the insight you seek if you want to know about the people (and places and events...) that led to her plays. It is more because of the unique form- you can see how Ms. Kennedy shapes her stories through her collage of memories.
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Five Stars
If you know any of Kennedy's works, especially her early stuff, this is absolutely invaluable.
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Beautiful, unconventional memoir
Such a wonderful examination of a lifetime of inspirations. I absolutely loved this book.
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Let me bore you with miniscule elements of no interest regarding my life.
Superficial to put it superficially. Of no purpose or value I could discern.