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Adam P. Kennedy is a writer/publisher. He is the creator of the television shows “Africa/U.S.A.: The Connection” and “The World Connection,” “edu-tainment” programs for teens that aired on network television and PBS. SLEEP DEPRIVATION CHAMBER, a collaboration with his mother, playwright Adrienne Kennedy, won the 1996 Obie Award for Best New American Play. In 1997, Adam, along with Karen Lauder and Marcus Ticotin, founded Abandon Entertainment, a television and movie company that produced the feature films “Oxygen” and “Scotland PA” and a made for TV movie on TNT, “Thrill Seekers.” In 2007, his publishing company, Kennedy Publishing, won the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award for excellence in literature for "Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles." A three-week theatrical run of the Beatles material launched the Public Lab Series at the Public Theatre in New York City. The play is published by Samuel French, Inc. He is the 2007 recipient of the Alumni Mentor Awards for Activism in Social Justice and the Arts from Manhattan Country School, his alma mater.
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Adrienne Kennedy was born Adrienne Lita Hawkins in Pittsburgh, PA, on September 13, 1931. Her father was a social worker and executive secretary of the YMCA, and her mother was a teacher. Her maternal grandfather was a wealthy white peach grower. She grew up in Cleveland and attended Ohio State University, where she received a bachelor's degree in education in 1953. She was married one month later to Joseph Kennedy and gave birth to a son. After Joseph Kennedy returned from Korea, the family moved to New York, where Adrienne developed her literary talents by attending creative writing classes at Columbia University. However, after seven years she still remained unpublished and unproduced. She traveled with her husband, by then a professor at Hunter College, to Europe and Africa in 1960. Upon arrival in Ghana she submitted a short story to the magazine “Black Orpheus.” It was accepted. At the age of twenty-nine she wrote the play FUNNYHOUSE OF A NEGRO. It was selected by Edward Albee to be produced in his workshop at Circle in the Square. In 1962 she joined Edward Albee's Playwrights' Workshop beginning her career in the theatre. In 1992 the Great Lakes Theatre Company organized a month-long celebration of her work. A few years later the Signature Theatre Company selected her as their playwright of the fall season and produced seven of her plays. Kennedy has been a lecturer at Yale and the University of California at Berkeley, and has taught playwriting at Princeton and Brown. She has received Guggenheim Fellowships and NEA and Rockefeller Foundation Grants. In 1992, the mayor of Cleveland declared March 7 to be Adrienne Kennedy Day. Her other plays include THE OWL ANSWERS (1963), A RAT’S MASS (1966), THE LENNON PLAY: IN HIS OWN WORDS (1967), A MOVIE STAR HAS TO STAR IN BLACK AND WHITE (1976), THE OHIO STATE MURDERS (1992), and an adaptation of OEDIPUS REX (2001).
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Adrienne Kennedy. Since Funnyhouse of a Negro blazed a trail in the American Theatre, Adrienne Kennedy's work has had a profound influence on American playwrights. Her plays The Owl Answers, Ohio State Murders, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, and her remarkable short plays: An Evening With Dead Essex, The Film Club, A Lesson in Dead Language, She Talks to Beethoven, and A Rat's Mass have enriched our concept of the possible on stage for the past thirty years and given us a vocabulary of dramatic technique no other writer has explored: the fragmentation of identity, the haunting use of repetition, the creation of elegiac language, an alienation of/and from canonical literature, and the journeys of race, gender, and sexual ruptures from the scripted and policed behaviors that a dominant culture has enforced. But her dream logic, her steadfast persistence, her witnessing to a vibrancy beneath the surface, feels triumphant. With a passion, a courage, a personal investment and visibility in her work, Ms. Kennedy continues to change the landscape of American drama with a wealth of plays whose importance will continue to inspire all in this field. \n\nMs. Kennedy is a three time Obie-award winner. Among her many honors are the Guggenheim fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters award, PEN/Laura Pels Award for Master American Dramatist, and Anisfield-Wolf Book's Lifetime Achievement Award. |