He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays

Description

He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box had its world premiere Off-Broadway in February of 2018 at Theatre for a New Audience in New York. Kennedy is an American playwright best known for her play Funnyhouse of a Negro which premiered in 1964 and won an Obie Award. Kennedy is known for her use of surrealism in her plays and drawing on mythical, historical, and imaginary figures to depict and explore the African-American experience. Much of her work is based on her lived experiences. Kennedy's other plays include: A Rat's Mass, Sun: A Poem for Malcolm X Inspired By His Death, A Beast Story, and a play cycle known as The Alexander Plays (She Talks to Beethoven, The Ohio State Murders, The Film Club, and The Dramatic Circle) Kennedy is the recipient of many awards for her plays, including: Obie Awards: for Distinguished Play for Funnyhouse of a Negro and Best American Play for both June and Jean in Concert and Sleep Deprivation Chamber. A Lifetime Achievement Award from the Obie Awards in 2008. A Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1967. A Rockefeller Foundation Grant in 1967 and again in 1970. A fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1972. The Creative Artists Public Service Grant in 1974. The Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards in 2003. The 2003 Pierre Lecomte du Nouy Award. In 1994, she won the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers' Award and an American Academy of the Arts and Letters award in Literature. In 2006, Kennedy received the Pen/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a Master American Dramatist. Kennedy was named the playwright in residence at Signature Theater Company in New York City from September 1995 - May 1996. Kennedy has taught at Yale University, Princeton University, Brown University, UC Berkeley, Harvard University, Stanford University, New York University and UC Davis. In 2003, she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Literature by her undergraduate alma mater, Ohio State University. In 2018, Kennedy was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.

Adrienne Kennedy has been an important figure 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.

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" Ms. Kennedy remains one the harshest -- and most invaluable -- of the American theater's conflicted sentimentalists.--Ben Brantley "New York Times" 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.-- "New York Times" People will be reading [her] work for centuries to come.-- "Henry Louis Gates, Jr." 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"