Confounded identities: Race, gender, culture in 'Adrienne Kennedy In One Act'

The body of playwright Adrienne Kennedy's work is about translating a cultural consciousness to the stage using the trappings of culture. Toward this end she neither invents a new language nor reconstructs the culture of which she is a product. Rather, she situates femaleness and blackness into the cultural construct even when that means demonstrating on what terms they are allowed in or how they are left out. In this dissertation I look at Kennedy's one act plays collected in the volume Adrienne Kennedy In One Act (Minnesota Press, 1988) and examine how each play grapples with the question of how women central to tier plays are to critique the culture that formed them and the culture that now excludes them because of their race and/or gender. Further, I explore the ways these women are marked by narrative, gender, race, and all the other limiting agents that keep them playing their assigned roles.