People Who Led to My Plays

By Adrienne Kennedy

Book Overview

A revealing collection of words, memories, and pictures--an autobiographical scrapbook--by an outstanding contemporary playwright.

In this remarkable memoir, Adrienne Kennedy charts her life from growing up in Cleveland in the 1930s and '40s in a middle-class Black family through marriage, motherhood, and her eventual move to New York City in the '50s. Out of a sequence of deceptively spare statements emerges a complex portrait of the artist as a young woman, as she examines the people and events that compelled her to be a writer.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1559361255
• ISBN13: 9781559361255
• Release Date: September 1996
• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 7.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Fascinating form and thought provoking content

This is an excellent book! If you have read any of Adrienne Kennedy's plays, you will appreciate the content. Other than reading the plays over and over, I believe this book is the most helpful in understanding her work and the sources for her inspiration. As an autobiography of sorts, it reads more like a journal, with her memories written throughout in the form of short sentences, pictures, and phrases. The form itself is fascinating- fragmented, like her plays. This book is so much more than it's content, which of course provides the insight you seek if you want to know about the people (and places and events...) that led to her plays. It is more because of the unique form- you can see how Ms. Kennedy shapes her stories through her collage of memories.

Honesty Anecdotes

"People Who Led to My Plays" by Adrienne Kennedy is one of the most engaging autobiographical works I have ever read. Kennedy walks her reader through her life up to when she wrote her first play "Funnyhouse of a Negro," and lists the many things that have influenced who she is and what she writes. Whether you're reading Kennedy's plays or not, this work will not only move you, but make you think about what has influenced and shaped your life. If you are studying Kennedy, this book is crucial to understanding her plays -- it is as though you are reading her life diaries. Her passion for experiences and the honesty with which she relates both the good and bad in life made me love reading every anecdote.