Adrianne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro - Essay Example

When reading the writing of African American women playwrights, aside from being conscious of their remarkable strength in confronting antagonistic and prejudiced socio-political environment and attempting to prevail over it through their writing, it is imperative to recognize that theater such as playwriting is the most unrestricted of all known literary genres; as a result, the theatrical genre convoluted the attempts of women playwrights in quest of settling this hostile environment in articulating their necessities and demands. In the 1950s, it was Adrienne Kennedy who became the paramount symbol of courage through the public genus of theater to begin an astonishingly intimate discovery of the African-American woman’s inner self with the masterpiece Funnyhouse of a Negro. Kennedy contemplates the outside world dimension that brings forth her agony and strips herself naked, revealing her inconsistencies, the fillet of her private and miserable self, in front of a crowd which embodies the outside world that persistently upsetting her. Plot, not particularly the story, is entirely missing in this play, restrained by an expressionistic and surrealistic mode stuffed with visual representations that point straightforwardly to the senses. Blood and death are two consistent illustrations in her plays. An intersection takes place between this non-linear and plot-less dramatic creation and the distressed perplexity and frantic search of Sarah, the protagonist, as she hunts to locate a place to which she can belong. However, if Sarah is subjected to the lens of Germanic expressionisms, other attributions and conflicts will emerge. I. Overview of the Funnyhouse of a Negro Kennedy presented the play as a writing sample together with her application in 1962 for admittance in Edward Albee’s workshop, where the play was initially acted at the Circle in the Square Theatre. Preeminently distinct at the moment as trial theater, the play radiates the surrealistic attributes of a nightmare. Its main character is portrayed as a young, fair-skinned Negro woman named Sarah. Sarah go into the play with a blood-stained and expressionless face; her head is bald and her fallen off hair is in her hands. She is described as an individual who is all together immature and antique. A rope fastened in a hangman’s loop wraps her neck. She conveys a dull and repetitive monologue recounting her assorted ethnic identities, narrating her educational achievement, her ancestry and her yearning to become an even more ashen Negro; she includes a condemnation of her blackness, declaring that black is, and from the beginning has been evil (Meigs 1990). Sarah is in the concluding phase of a condition of severe schizophrenia ushered in by a history of diverse physical and emotional maltreatments and, in a more significant conception, colonization. Four alter egos coexist in her hallucinations: Queen Victoria, Duchess of Hapsburg, Patrice Lumumba and Jesus. Patrice Lumumba embodies the African attributes of Sarah’s multiethnic and multicultural origins. The other three alter egos are hostile toward the African existence, who is emotional in a number of crazy monologues with the rape of Sarah’s whitish mother. They are clued-up by an insensible logic that all continuing problems have originated from that indicator incident (Sollors 1991). Blackness has contaminated and infected Sarah’s being. In her opening monologue, Negro-Sarah stresses that there is no rational association among her selves, no argument, and this allegation about the play was by and large articulated by some initial critiques who berated Funnyhouse for being exceptionally abstract. A funnyhouse is a place of ugly deformations, and Kennedy’s play is rampant with imageries, surreal visual representations and allegorical intricacies. Still, the connection among madness, absurdity, discrimination and cruelty is well-defined. The fashioning of a schizophrenic character representing ethnic and cultural multiplicity permits Kennedy to endeavor in simultaneous dialogues on racial, sexual and political concerns (Scanlan 1992). Premature appraisal of her work as disjointed and defective may reflect more upon an absence of awareness by individual critics than upon Kennedy’s talents. Even though Kennedy created the play in 1960, the historical setting for its initial practiced production positions it in the center of a most brutal period in American history. With regard to the theme, Funnyhouse assumes a number of issues that have ever since become the concern of study and discourses in academic and other contexts. Social equity, the psychosocial outcomes of assimilation, gender issues such as the suffering associated with the regular rape of African American women subjected to slavery, colonial oppression in a postcolonial period and an array of cruelties are all investigated to differing extents. Multicultural contradictions are acted out within Sarah as an entity detached against itself. European and Christian characters in Sarah’s hallucinations can merely define the African persona as something unpleasant and devoid of values and morality; yet, when they pursued the African into the wilderness to batter him to death, they also destroyed themselves (Meigs 1990). Sarah’s suicide is remarked upon offhandedly and coldheartedly at the conclusion of the play by her Jewish lover and her white landlady. These two personalities contribute also as the ugly and bobbing forms normally located at the entrance to the funnyhouse. The disparity between their apathetic response to Sarah’s suicide and what has been exposed only moments previously as the dreadfully besieged quality of her presence is merely one among many disquieting and unsettling effects warily fabricated by the playwright (Scanlan 1992). II. Funnyhouse of a Negro: A German Expressionist Drama The term Expressionism originated from the fine arts. It was named by the French painter Herve in 1901 to play as a common ground for the art of Van Gogh, Matisse and Cezanne (Kostelanetz 1982). The celebrated art historian and curator Worringer made it known into German in 1911, and immediately afterward the critic and playwright Herman Bahr pioneered it as a concept distinguishing a new form of literature that had emerged in German-speaking societies around 1910 and was to thrive into the twenties. Noticeable individual indifferences survived among the poets and playwrights of the present generation. However, adequate ordinary qualities appeared to unite them to allow critics, editors and intellectuals to feel vindicated in applying the term Expressionism, and so to mark them as a movement. The merging attributes were perceived to be revolt, alteration and daringness of novelty. The originality of this movement was particularly prominent in lyric poetry and drama. The innovative playwrights such as Adrienne Kennedy and many others such as Sorge, Hasenclever, Werfer, Goll, in spite of deep-seated dissimilarities in spirit and form, appeared to possess this in common, which is they revolted against decorum and common sense, against power and established principles in art and life. They rebuffed the tradition of the well-crafted play and the standards of plausibility and superior judgment in art. They liberally defied the model of objective reckoning of everyday existence, on which realistic drama had been derived; yet, they similarly rejected the contemptuous remoteness from modern-day urban reality that typified those who intended to breathe life into historical romanticism or neoclassicism. Along with the prevailing art of bourgeois society, they declined, unveiled and sketched its traditions and institutions. The German expressionists consequently influenced the American Expressionism of the theater of the twenties, and the supposed Theatre of the Absurd of the contemporary period. American drama, such as the Funnyhouse of a Negro, is quite similar with German expressionism since it is a convenience making a logical discourse about the series of cultural history, such as African-American colonialism and post colonialism. There were a number of significant things that most Expressionist dramas and plays share, and that discriminate them from conventionally made plays, or realistic and Naturalistic plays, or plays of the archetypal tradition. To blind the audiences’ eyes to this reality, from anxiety of generalization, would be as immature as to anticipate that each play referred to as Expressionist should in every aspect play the game of all other plays of this group, or must in every value differ from all the creations of other eras and movements. Hence, before conducting an in-depth analysis of Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro in the light of German expressionism, it is initially significant to discuss about the basic premises of the movement in drama. Oppression, or rather, for instance colonial violence such as the rape of African-American women as espoused in contemporary American drama, was one of the focal points of the intrigues surrounding German expressionist playwrighting. It is manifested not merely in the plays that were created but also in the psychological disposition of the writers themselves. At all times, it influences their associations towards their fellow artists and towards the larger worldly dimension. As drama was the most essential of the written Expressionist genres, it enclosed all the ideological qualities of Expressionism entirely, counting oppression. The concept of drama as an undertaking to pronounce insights had a profound consequence on its form. Expressionist drama deviated from the demand for fundamental logic and plausibility, for coherent plot and for practically-based characters. In its place, it provided a wobbly structure of orientations of the mind that were to be comprehended in symbolic terms as moral exemplars for its spectators to abide by. According to Manfred Schneider (1919), “The Expressionist dramatists frees man from his milieu, he writes no mere play of marriage, no tragedies that arise from the clash of convention against the urge of freedom; he presents no puppets that hang from the wires of psychological views and play, laugh, and suffer amid the laws, the attitudes, the errors and vices of this man-made society” (16-17). This quote implies that the work of art, specifically that of the dramatist, must originate from the idea. Detail submits to the universal, the ordinary. Both the dramatist and his creations should carry the image of a Weltanschauung, or the viewpoint of the world (Goldberg 1922). The phenomenal gives way to the significant, significance that obtains stronger outlines, more plentiful sweep, and more anxious forms. Entities and persons are to be freed from their numerous interrelationships and address themselves independently. Fierce rival of such a program is psychology, with its concentration to entities and persons in their intertwined empathy to one another. With a man unshackled from all restrictions he becomes once again skilled of profound, immediate sentiments. Therefore, given with these underlying premises of German Expressionist dramatic techniques, specifically in playwrighting, it is relevant to scrutinize Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro into the three expressionist themes, grotesque distortions, psychological detachment from reality and oppression and violence. A. Funnyhouse of a Negro: A Legacy of German Expressionist’s Grotesque Distortions Sarah and his alter egos always claim that the rooms, “are my rooms; a Hapsburg chamber, a chamber in a Victorian castle, the hotel where I killed my father, the jungle. There are the places myselves exist in. I know no places. That is, I cannot believe in places. To believe in places is to know hope and to know emotion of hope is to know beauty. I find there are no places only my funnyhouse… I try to create a space for myselves in cities… but it becomes a lie” (Vaughn 1980: 77). Sarah’s multiple personalities, namely, Sarah the Negro, the Duchess of Hapsburg, Queen Victoria and the Mother, is constantly changing and frayed between two races, the black and white, demonstrate her routine and agonizing effort to find her true self. With respect to belongingness and identity, Bill Ashcroft identifies that, “in post colonial literatures, there is a special concern about finding a relevant relationship between self and place, because the process of subjectivity can only be conducted in its interconnectedness with place” (Barrios 2003: 1). Sarah fails to find a suitable place for herself and has no optimism to find one; indeed, she does not accept as true the existence of places. Nevertheless, confronted with the likelihood of locating a place, she constructs alter egos inside her funnyhouse, which may signify the breathing space of her hallucinations, which is an annex of her own self. Yet, rather than imagining in this specific instance, and because of the conflicts in her multiple personalities, her own conception turns out to be a nightmare to her. The inaccessibility to put to rights her alter egos and incapability to find a suitable place that awards her freedom to be her true self constructs Sarah as a tragic protagonist. Moreover, the difference between ‘black’ and ‘white’ identities is already disturbed before the opening of the play. Kennedy creates her plays from culturally mixed heritages and from emphasis of divisions of racial categories, in addition to the multiple focuses within functioning structures of racial belongingness, but declares no standpoint as conclusive. On behalf of her own African-American female identity, Kennedy shifted into a zone otherwise almost completely inhibited from dramatic representation: a heedful recognition of mixed ancestry. Funnyhouse itself puts on display a mixed ancestry of Caucasion, North American, African and African-American figures and modes. The personas emanate from the falsehoods of British colonialism represented by Queen Victoria Regina and the Duchess of Hapsburg, Christianity embodied by the personal of Jesus, American postcolonial macabre and Ghanaian figures characterized by the Man or Patrice Lumumba. Even the play’s scheme or lack of plot, mirrors Western European surrealism, avant-garde disappointment at mythic disparities, postmodern intricate peculiarities, absurdities, African-American religious traditions and African hymns and masquerades. Hence, the ebony masks, indeed, may confer to African ways of life. Funnyhouse is opposed to plot rundown. To embody the plot is to attempt to account for the bizarre personas and scenes. The play transpires mostly in the room or the mind of the protagonist, Sarah. Other characters in the play, namely, the Duchess, Queen, Jesus and Patrice Lumumba, represent her multiple identities. The cast of characters does not determine the Mother as a part of her alter egos, yet she consumes a powerful spot in Sarah’s make-believe world. Two other characters, detached from Sarah’s selves, are her white landlady and her Jewish boyfriend Raymond, who also known as the Funnyhouse Lady and the Funnyhouse Man. The play begins with the Duchess and Victoria conversing about the insistent knocking of the door throughout the play; this knocking signify the comeback of the ebony black father, who sexually harassed Sarah’s exceptionally light-skinned African-American mother to bring into being the fair-skinned Sarah. Sarah repeatedly reveals her fear and loathing of the ebony black father and of blackness, and her yearning to be one of the white-skinned creatures. She is disgusted with her kinky hair. Gradually, Sarah’s alter egos began to lose their hair in patches throughout the play. The landlady informs the spectators that Sarah’s father killed himself through hanging himself in a Harlem hotel the moment Patrice Lumumba was assassinated but that Sarah perseveres instead that she “bludgeoned himself with an ebony skull” (Genet 1960: 8). Duchess and the Funnyman afterwards discuss the father as a Christian messenger roaming the African jungle. The father, who is name Patrice Lumumba next emerged and narrates to the audience of his aspirations to save his race from doom. The Duchess and Jesus lost their hairs. The landlady detailed Sarah’s unkindness to her father at their most recent meeting, her incapability to let off him for being black. Jesus declares he hunt the black man in the jungle to kill him. The climax of the play takes place in the jungle, to the dimension which all of Sarah’s personas have sojourned. With clouds on their heads, they utter and sing in rhythmic variations about the black father wandering in the African jungles who “keeps returning forever, returning and returning” (Kennedy 2001: 17). In a progression of quick images the crowd glimpses a statuette of Queen Victoria “of astonishing repulsive whiteness”, (ibid: 18) then the father quickly approaching Sarah, then the hanging form of Sarah all together with the apathetic laughing of the landlady. The landlady recounted that Sarah has killed herself through hanging as her father did. However, Raymond disputed that Sarah’s father on no account hanged himself; rather he is alive and living an affluent life in the city with a white whore. The last enigmatic line of the play was uttered by the Funnyman, “Her father is a nigger who eats his meals on a white glass table” (ibid: 26). Through summarizing the so-called plot of the story, the ‘plotlessness’ of the play has been emphasized. Akin to the Germanic expressionist techniques, the Funnyhouse refuse to go along with sequence, which is then a manifestation of grotesque distortion. Instead, it outlines itself on reiteration, which is actually compulsive repetition. Bizarre replications and repetitions bolster each other as the double forceful elements structuring Funnyhouse. The foundation of the play, for Kennedy, embodies the confusions that may be endured by a number of racially mixed African Americans thoughtful to both their racial affinities, in addition to their African American and European, birthrights. One of the techniques employed in the play, and which resembles the bold and innovative strategies of the German expressionist drama, is the theatrical presentation of multiplicity and estrangement through the use of masks. Symbolic masks rest at the heart of the play’s interpretation of racial identity; undeniably, concepts of black and white are themselves masks. In the first scene of the play, an audience sees, “Before the closed Curtain a Woman dressed in a white nightgown walks across the Stage carrying before her bald head. She moves as one in a trance and is mumbling something inaudible to herself. Her hair is wild, straight and black and falls to her waist. As she moves, she gives the effect of one in a dream. Before she has barely vanished, the CURTAIN opens. It is a white satin Curtain of a cheap material and a ghastly white, a material that brings to mind the interior of a cheap casket, parts of it are frayed and look as if it has been gnawed by rats” (Kennedy 2001: 11-12). The concurrence of this wild and kinky hair with the severed, bald head centers hair as a most important meaning of Funnyhouse. Fascinatingly, the racial affiliation of neither the woman nor the head without hair is specified in the theatrical stage directions. This nonexistence is even more prominent provided that the title of the stage play would quickly awaken the spectators to racial characteristics. Audiences gain knowledge from other characters later on in the play that this woman is the exceptionally white-skinned African-American mother of the Negro named Sarah. Contrary to the extremely pallid textiles of the nightgown and curtains, and to the incredibly dark hair of the woman, her race is not evidently white or black; even referring to her as a “very light-skinned black woman” (Kennedy 2001: 15). The author, in her theatrical play directions, by no means categorizes the race of this mysterious mother in her personal alienated authorial articulation, but merely in the personified voices of her characters, namely, Sarah, Duchess, Victoria, Jesus and the landlady. Audiences of the play are still unaware of the racial affinity of the decapitated head carried by the Mother. It is quite confusing if the head symbolizes the yellowish Mother, or the brown-skinned Sarah, or the black Patrice Lumumba. Whether the white or very black, or male or female, it could possibly be even more pointedly remote race and gender as locations of dissimilarities which the play fanatically contemplates upon. If the head resembles the woman, it brings into awareness the theme of repetition in a play of deception carried out aggressively, in which is it highly impossible to identify which is the novel or genuine or factual, and which is the mask. This bald head plays as a façade to the woman who carries it in that, although her own head is entirely out in the open, the bald head preceding her existence arbitrates and heralds the audiences’ viewpoints of her. On the other hand, the woman’s otherworldly conditions prior to the curtain may imply that everything in the wake of it is her dream, or nightmare. Yet, it is not merely a curtain of sleep, but also of funeral; so that it preempts the play as an obscured past returning to disturb, or as a supernatural past fruitlessly subjugated. Even though the elements behind the curtain are the mother’s fantasy, it is a hallucination which shaped her daughter Sarah’s experience of reality. B. Funnyhouse of a Negro: A Germanic Expressionist’s Progeny of Psychological Detachment At the rear of the curtain, “TWO WOMEN are sitting in what appears to be a Queen’s chamber…QUEEN VICTORIA is standing before her bed holding a small mirror in her hand. On the white pillow of her bed is a dark, indistinguishable object. The DUCHESS OF HAPSBURG is standing at the foot of the bed… Throughout the entire scene, they do not move. BOTH WOMEN are dressed in royal gowns of white, a white similar to the white of the Curtain, the material cheap satin… Their headpieces are white and of a net that falls over their faces. From beneath both their headpieces springs a heedful of wild kinky hair… They look exactly alike… It is an alabaster face… If the characters do not wear a mask, then the face must be highly powdered and possess a hard expressionless quality and a stillness as in the face of death” (Kennedy 2001: 12). The overstated paleness of these women already foreshadows the exceptionally black father figure. The wild kinky hair of the Duchess and Queen, in straight contradiction to their prominent white masks, straightforwardly proclaims the deceptiveness of the role-playing. Moreover, audiences know that Sarah comes first before the Duchess and the Queen, who are herselves. Furthermore, Sarah is also known as Negro Sarah which immediately identifies her as the independent character, that Negro, hurdled so firmly with an emphasis to her more personalizing surname, also comes prior to that individuality. Audiences are aware that Sarah is black, and that the blackness beneath the ashen masks of the Duchess and Queen is a representation of Sarah’s blackness. In the passages written above, it only demonstrates that Sarah as a racially black woman is encapsulated in a psychological world wherein she has to freed herself from the maddening reality of her life. Hence, she forcefully immersed herself to the world of the white women who were powerful during the period of oppression or colonialism. In so doing, Sarah as a black woman temporarily left her actual hiding place and crossed the threshold of sanity and madness. Moreover, the implication of the statement declaring that devoid of the mask the faces must have been whitened with powder and the remnants of death is that Sarah is struggling to escape from her birthright background while simultaneously forcing herself in the world of the powerful white women. An ultramodern play, Funnyhouse of a Negro was written in 1961 during Kennedy’s travel to West Africa, at the same time as carrying her second son. The title came from an amusement park in Cleveland which portrayed a funnyhouse with two enormous white figures alighted on sides, moving back and forth and laughing frantically at the bewildered patrons inside (Barrios 2003). The plot is situated in a frightening frame that introduces Sarah as a young black woman who is tortured and torn by her multiple personalities, and who is anxious of the possible return of her father. Two other noteworthy characters in the story are Patricia Lumumba, who is also the father and the husband and who encloses himself with white acquaintances in order to stop thinking about the mission to save his people; and Jesus Christ, depicted as powerless to free himself from the fetters of blackness. Finally, there are the Funnylady, the white landlady, and the Funnyman, Sarah’s Jewish boyfriend, who match the amused figures of the Cleveland house. Sarah, incapable to resolve the vagueness and agony of being black, commits suicide at the end of the play. Sarah’s suicide preserves an encircled double-sidedness. On the one hand, it symbolizes the protagonist’s crushing defeat in failing to reunite the heartrending racial confrontation erected between two varying cultures, namely, Anglo and African-American, which destroys her genuine identity. Negro Sarah even determined that, “My friends will be white. I need them as an embankment to keep me from reflecting too much upon the fact that I am a Negro; for, like all educated Negroes, out of life and death essential, I find it necessary to maintain a stark fortress against recognition of myself” (Feder 1980: 26). Read More