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    He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays
    He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays
    He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays
    Ebook128 pages1 hour

    He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays

    By Adrienne Kennedy

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTheatre Communications Group
    Release dateNov 17, 2020
    ISBN9781559369282
    He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays

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      Book preview

      He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays - Adrienne Kennedy

      He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box

      PRODUCTION HISTORY

      He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box had its world premiere at Theatre for a New Audience (Jeffrey Horowitz, Founding Artistic Director; Dorothy Ryan, Managing Director; Michael Page, General Manager) in New York, on January 18, 2018. It was directed by Evan Yionoulis. The scenic design was by Christopher Barreca, the costume design was by Montana Levi Blanco, the lighting design was by Donald Holder, the original music and sound design were by Justin Ellington, the video design was by Austin Switser; the dramaturg was Jonathan Kalb, and the production stage manager was Cole Bonenberger. The cast was:

      Images

      TRAIN CARS

      Dark, passing WHITE/COLORED stations.

      NEW YORK THEATER

      Small like old Amato Opera House.

      STAGE

      Opera backdrop.

      BACKSTAGE

      Dressing room.

      Table, chair, mirror.

      SCHOOL

      Kay enters from beyond; near her is a long, long, staircase, dark.

      She is pretty, fragile, pale.

      Watches play through an opening that leads to the stage.

      Music

      The song See See Rider Blues runs throughout the play.

      It is the motif of this world.

      The Ma Rainey version I heard as a child, summers in Georgia.

      Place

      Montefiore, Georgia.

      June 1941.

      Outside the town a boarding school for colored.

      School play, The Massacre at Paris, is in progress.

      Characters

      HARRISON AHERNE

      Chris’s father.

      KAY

      Very pretty, student, seventeen.

      When not in school she lives with her grandmother, a servant for people who run the town’s canning factory.

      They live in the center of the colored district in a decent house bought for her by the canning family.

      CHRIS

      Handsome, seventeen.

      Working in a building adjacent to the school storeroom and office.

      Office belongs to Harrison Aherne, white, one of the founders of the school.

      Chris is his son.

      Chris and Kay have known each other all their lives.

      The town has less than six hundred people.

      Chris lives with his parents in a house right on the edge of town.

      His father, Harrison Aherne, is a landowner and businessman, and architect of the town’s segregation.

      Chris’s mother, originally from Oglethorpe, has just died.

      People see each other constantly on Main Street.

      The people are all somehow connected.

      Kay’s father was a white writer of history and mystery. Her mother, who shot herself in the head when Kay was a baby, was colored. Her name was Mary.

      Kay’s father, who lived in nearby Oglethorpe, saw Mary most of the time when she helped her mother and he was a visitor at the canning family, the Walkers.

      Kay’s mother, Mary, was fifteen, striking and quiet.

      The school play, The Massacre at Paris, is in progress.

      Kay at the top of the stairwell can see through to the stage, hear clearly, see vague motion.

      Down this long, long dark stairwell is a door.

      Kay watches the play.

      We hear voices.

      On the walls of the school’s corridor are drawings of Dante.

      From the stage The Massacre at Paris:

      The children of the boarding school are all colored.

      The students in the play are about twelve to seventeen.

      They say the lines accordingly:

      Although my downfall be the deepest hell

      For this I wake when others think I sleep

      For this I wait that scorns attendance else

      For this my quenchless thirst … whereon I Build

      Hath often pleaded kindred to the King

      For this, this head this heart this hand and sword

      Contrives, imagines, and fully executes

      Matters of import aimed at by many

      Yet understood by none

      For this hath heaven engendered me of earth.

      The students do not try to make meaning of this play, it was assigned to them to perform.

      Their courses of study are carefully monitored by the mayor’s committee, although the headmaster is colored …

      Headmaster Roseboro is a young Negro who graduated from Morehouse, a man who is dedicated to his students and has the burden of negotiating with the mayor’s committee, who is white.

      The lines read by the students are barely understandable.

      The Massacre at Paris was chosen for unknown reasons by Harrison Aherne.

      Kay watches the motion on the stage and listens.

      The play continues from the stage:

      My noble son and Princely Duke of Guise,

      Now have we got the fatal straggling deer

      Within the compass of a deadly toil

      And as we late decreed, we may perform.

      Though gentle minds should pity others’ pains

      Yet will the wisest note their proper

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