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PRODUCTION HISTORY

"Funnyhouse of a Negro" opened as a Theatre 1964 production at the East End Theater on January 14, 1964. Previously, the work was given a non-professional presentation in Edward Albee's Playwriting Workshop at the Circle in the Square.

ORIGINAL CAST

The original cast included the following actors in the leading roles:

Billie Allen

Ellen Holly

Cynthia Belgrave

Gus Williams

CHARACTERS

Sarah, Negro

Duchess of Hapsburg, One of Herselves

Queen Victoria, One of Herselves

Patrice Lumumba, One of Herselves

Jesus, One of Herselves

The Mother

Landlady, Funnylady

Raymond, Funnyman

SYNOPSIS

Taken from Contemporary Authors

"Kennedy's first play, Funnyhouse of a Negro, examines the psychological problems of Sarah, a young mulatto woman who lives with a Jewish poet in a boarding house run by a white landlady. Dealing with the last moments before Sarah's suicide, the play consists of scenes of the young woman's struggle with herself. Tortured by an identity crisis, Sarah is 'lost in a nightmare world where black is evil and white is good, where various personages, including Queen Victoria, Patrice Lumumba, and Jesus Himself, materialize to mock her,' says New Yorker's Edith Oliver."

SETTING

The setting reflects the main character's state of mind and includes a funnyhouse, Queen Victoria's bedroom chamber, the chandelier ballroom of the Duchess of Hapsburg, a student's room in a brownstone boardinghouse in New York, and an African jungle.

EXCERPT FROM THE PLAY

Then to the right front of the stage comes the white light. It goes to a suspended stairway. At the foot of it stands the LANDLADY. She is a tall, thin woman dressed in a black hat with red and appears to be talking to someone in a suggested open doorway in a corridor of a rooming house. She laughs like a mad character in a funnyhouse throughout her speech.

LANDLADY: (looking up the stairway) Every since her father hung himself in a Harlem hotel when Patrice Lumumba was murdered, she hides in her room. Each night she repeats; he keeps returning. How dare he enter the castle walls, he who is the darkest of them all, the darkest one. My mother looked like a white woman, hair as straight as any white woman's. And I am yellow but he, he is black, the blackest one of them all. I hoped he was dead. Yet still he comes through the jungle.

I tell her: Sarah, honey, the man hung himself. It's not your blame. But, no, she stares at me: No, Mrs. Conrad, he did not hang himself, that is only the way they understand it, they do, but the truth is that I bludgeoned his head with an ebony skull that he carries about with him. Wherever he goes, he carries out black masks and heads.

She's suffering so till her hair has fallen out. But then she did always hide herself in that room with the walls of books and her statues. I always did know she thought she was somebody else, a Queen or something, somebody else.

Blackout

PUBLICATION HISTORY

Samuel French, 1969.

also appears in the following anthologies:

Adrienne Kennedy in One Act. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

Contemporary Black Drama; From "A Raisin in the Sun" to "No Place to Be Somebody". Clinton F. Oliver and Stephanie Sills (Eds.). New York: Scribner, 1971.

Black Drama: An Anthology. William Brasmer and Dominick Consolo (Eds.). Columbus, OH: C.E. Merrill Publishing Company, 1970.