Adrienne Kennedy - Biography

Biography

Adrienne Kennedy was born Adrienne Lita Hawkins on September 13. 1931 in Pittsburgh, PA. Her mother Etta Hawkins was a teacher and her father Cornell Wallace Hawkins was a social worker. She spent most of her childhood in Cleveland, Ohio. She grew up in an integrated neighborhood and didn’t face many prejudices until her college years at Ohio State University. As a child she spent most of her time reading books like Jane Eyre and The Secret Garden. She often enjoyed spending time reading instead of engaging in games many other children enjoyed. She admired and crushed on actors like Orson Welles. Not until her teen years did she begin to enjoy and focus more on plays. One of the first plays she saw was The Glass Menagerie. It was plays such as this that inspired Adrienne to explore her passions for playwriting.

When she went to Ohio State University her interest in playwriting continued. Eventually she met and married Joseph Kennedy, with whom she had two children, Joseph Jr. and Adam. When her husband went off to fight in the Vietnam War while she was pregnant, she was able to write her first play. Her first produced play was Funnyhouse of a Negro. Most of Adrienne’s work was based on her experience. Lovalerie King said Kennedy’s plays “featured nonlinear narratives, dramatic and surrealistic imagery, split characters who existed in dreamlike states, fragmented formats, and unconventional plots." Her routine use of poetic and buoyant language, pregnant with multiple levels of meaning, makes Kennedy a deliberate master of the verbal metaphor. She combines elements of expressionism with a verbal fluidity to evoke a series of profound and provocative effects. Critics of Kennedy's work must be attuned to a variety of critical approaches and traditions to accurately assess her value to the theatrical community”.

She was later a founding member of the Women’s Theatre Council in 1971. She won several awards for her plays including two Village Voice Obie Awards. She wrote thirteen published plays, five unpublished, several autobiographies, a novella and a short story. She also wrote under aliases like Adrienne Cornell. She got her bachelors degree at Ohio State University for education but also got a degree at Columbia University. She and her husband moved to England and eventually divorced. She currently lectures at Yale University, Princeton University, University of California, Berkeley and University of California, Davis.