Zakiyyah Alexander on Iconoclast Adrienne Kennedy

Zakiyyah Alexander discusses Adrienne Kennedy, a writer who has steadfastly refused to be bound by tradition or expectation throughout her long career as a playwright, memoirist, essayist and novelist. In the sixties when Adrienne arrived in New York, her play, Funnyhouse of a Negro, was unlike anything seen before. When it won the Obie, her career was launched, and she has continued to blaze trails of form and content ever since. Lyrical, violent, dreamlike, deeply personal, but not naturalistic — critic Alisa Solomon describes Adrienne’s plays as expressing  “the process of turning memory into meaning.”

In this interview, Zakiyyah describes her recent experiences with octogenarian Adrienne, who still refuses to be categorized. Go Adrienne! Check it out.

Click on the picture below to view the clip:

“She decided she was going to break all the rules.”

With our new backyard video project, Look What She Did!, we are creating an ongoing archive of short videos celebrating crazy-great women as told to us by… crazy-great women. See more videos posted on our YouTube channel and our Facebook page. All of us working on this project are having a blast and are fired up about sharing these inspiring stories with you.

Check out more about Look What She Did! at www.juliehebert.com.

MORE VIDEOS on our LWSD! Facebook page.

Subscribe to the LWSD! YouTube channel!

What are you looking for?