Funnyhouse of a Negro is a one-act play by Adrienne Kennedy. The play opened off-Broadway in 1964 and won the Obie Award for Distinguished Play. The play shared this award with Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, and was influenced by her radical imagination; critics have read it in conversation with both the Black Arts Movement and the Theater of the Absurd.Hill, Errol, and James Vernon Hatch. A History of African-American Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print. While the play has been produced on stage numerous times, it has been more frequently studied in academic settings than it has been produced.
Summary The play tells the story of a young woman named Sarah living in New York City, and focuses on Sarah's internal struggle with her racial identity. She spends much of the play grappling with her feelings about her mixed ancestry; she idolizes her white mother and despises her black father. To demonstrate this internal struggle, Kennedy transforms the stage into a manifestation of Sarah's mind and uses historical figures to represent Sarah's mixed black and white ancestry. These characters are manifestations of Sarah's self, and include Queen Victoria, the Duchess of Hapsburg, Patrice Lumumba, and Jesus Christ.
The play was written during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, which had a strong masculine element. Kennedy's female perspective was a rarity for the time and the movement. Funnyhouse of a Negro takes place in Sarah's mind, allowing the audience to witness the anxiety, entrapment, and alienation of being a black woman in the United States. Kennedy focuses on the obsession with whiteness and the struggle of mixed ancestry, and the audience ultimately witnesses the complete fragmentation of Sarah's self.
Plot The play opens with a dreamlike sequence of a woman in a white nightgown with long, dark hair crossing the stage. The woman, who the audience later learns is Sarah's mother, carries a bald head in her hands. A white curtain opens, revealing Sarah's bedroom. The play takes place in Sarah's mind, with her room as a symbol for her obsession with whiteness. The white statue of Queen Victoria on the stage is a symbol of whiteness.
The first scene is between Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Hapsburg, with Sarah's room representing the Queen's chambers. This gives the audience an understanding of the permeability of the set, as it constantly takes on new forms for its various inhabitants. The two women discuss whiteness, with the Queen stating: "My mother was the light. She was the lightest one. She looked like a white woman." Their conversation is not their own words, but the words of Sarah. The Queen and Duchess embody Anglo-American culture and are a manifestation of Sarah's white self.
The conversation between the Queen and Duchess is interrupted by the woman from the opening sequence's knocking and yelling about how she should have never let a black man touch her. This is how we first learn of Sarah's hatred towards her black father. The scene shifts into one of Sarah's monologues, and ends with a comment from the landlady, who is one of the few characters who exists outside of Sarah's mind and therefore one of the few manifestations of reality in the play. The landlady helps the audience to understand Sarah's situation, explaining how her father killed himself when Patrice Lumumba was killed. The landlady says that Sarah hasn't left her room since her father's death, and that Sarah claims her father did not actually hang himself, but rather, she "bludgeoned his head with an ebony skull that he carries about with him. Wherever he goes, he carries black masks and heads." The scene ends with the landlady's comments about how Sarah's hair has fallen out and how she always knew that Sarah wanted to be someone else. This scene introduces us to the motif of hair, which recurs throughout the play. There is also a persistent knocking sound in the background for the rest of the play, representing the father's attempts to return to Sarah's life.
The next scene is between the Duchess and Raymond, the funnyman of the funnyhouse. The two characters discuss the Duchess' father, who is actually Sarah's father, as the Duchess is an extension of Sarah. They call the father a "wild beast" who raped Sarah's mother, and compare his blackness to the mother's whiteness. Finally, the Duchess reveals that the mother is currently in an asylum and is completely bald; this explains the significance of the opening sequence of the play. The audience also learns that the Duchess' hair is falling out; this implies that Sarah's hair is falling out, because her white self cannot coexist with her black self.
The next scene contains a speech by Lumumba, a manifestation of Sarah's black self. His character is unknown to the audience, and he holds a mask in his hands. The speech discusses how Sarah is haunted by her bald mother in her sleep, blaming Sarah's father for her plight into insanity, saying, "Black man, black man, my mother says, I never should have let a black man put his hands on me."
The next scene begins with a movement sequence between the Duchess and Queen, in which they discover that the Queen's hair has fallen out on her pillow, and the Duchess tries to place hair back onto her head. As they continue to pantomime, Lumumba's character returns for another monologue, in which he gives more information about Sarah's life. The audience learns that Sarah is a student at a city college in New York, and that she dreams of being surrounded by European antiques and having white friends. He also explains that Sarah's black father was given mixed messages about his identity by his parents. His mother wanted him to go to Africa and save the race, while his father told him that "the race was no damn good." Lumumba's speech ends with the claim that Sarah's father tried to hang himself in a Harlem hotel, but leaves ambiguity as to whether he died.
The next scene is between the Duchess and Jesus in the Duchess' palace. They are both bald, and express their fear surrounding the loss of hair. The scene begins with a movement sequence between the Duchess and Jesus, similar to that between the Duchess and the Queen, in which the two characters sit on a bench, attempting to brush the shreds of hair left on their heads. When they speak, they discuss how the father won't leave them alone. The landlady enters and tells a story about how Sarah's father asked her for forgiveness for being black, and she would not give him forgiveness. The scene ends with Jesus telling the Duchess that he plans to go to Africa to kill Patrice Lumumba.
The next scene takes place in a jungle, which covers the entire stage, while Sarah's bedroom remains in the background. Jesus appears, surrounded by the rest of the characters, all with nimbuses on their heads "in a manner to suggest that they are saviors". The group speaks in unison about how they believed their father to be God, but he is black. They speak of how his darkness killed the lightness, or Sarah's mother, and haunted Sarah's conception. Finally, they say that they are bound to the father unless he dies. They all rush to the grass in unison and repeat their chants, as the mother enters. They enact a conversation between Sarah and her father, in which he seeks forgiveness for being black, and Sarah asks him why he raped her mother then states how she wants to "bludgeon him with an ebony head." All of the characters run around the stage laughing and screaming until the blackout.
As the final scene begins, a new wall drops onto stage. A white statue of Queen Victoria acts as the representation of Sarah's room. Sarah appears in the light, "standing perfectly still, we hear the KNOCKING, the LIGHTS come on quickly, her FATHER'S black figure with bludgeoned hands rushes upon her, the LIGHT GOES BLACK and we see her hanging in the room." The landlady and Raymond enter, noticing Sarah's hanging body. The landlady remarks on the sadness of Sarah's situation, when Raymond says, "She was a funny little liar." He then says that her father never actually hanged himself, but rather, he is a doctor and married to a white woman, living the life that Sarah dreamed of having.
Symbolism The "funnyhouse" Kennedy addresses in Funnyhouse of a Negro is the madhouse of racism. Sarah is torn between the paradoxes of black and white, past and present, flesh and spirit. The play also dramatizes the sexual economy of racism that constructs blacks as hypersexual and culturally deficient. Additionally, Funnyhouse of a Negro demonstrates global citizenship from multiple perspectives: as Africans, as Americans, as women, and as women of color. At the time the play was written, there was a theme among black playwrights addressing a newly awakened social consciousness manifested in a movement to sustain or rebuild ties with Africa.
Kennedy's play seeks to deconstruct and disempower "thing white thing" by showing audiences haunting and perverse images of whiteness. Kennedy uses whiteface to interrogate perceptions of whiteness, a signifying strategy. Kennedy references blackface by using transracial mimicry. She revises the meaning of minstrelsy through enactment of white, rather than black, representation. The skin tone is envisioned as "whitish yellow" or "alabaster", illustrating that "pure whiteness" is a myth. Though Sarah is in whiteface, her "wild kinky hair" is highlighted, reminding the audience of who is beneath the mask.Young, Harvey. The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Print. This is also a reminder of the miscegenated reality of blacks and whites in America. Additionally, the Queen and Duchess symbolize power, but are used to de-romanticize idealized perceptions of whiteness. They are white, but both have "kinky hair", demonstrating Sarah's identity conflict.Petrusso, A. "Overview of 'Funnyhouse of a Negro'." Drama for Students. Ed. Ira Mark Milne. Vol. 9. Detroit: Gale, 2000. Literature Resource Center.
Characters Adrienne Kennedy's interest in foreign landscapes crystallized in 1960 while she was aboard the Queen Elizabeth to England, France, Spain, and Africa, and during this trip she drew inspiration for the characters in Funnyhouse of a Negro.MLA Carter, Steven. "ADRIENNE KENNEDY (1931– )." African American Dramatists: An A-to-Z Guide. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2004. ABC-CLIO eBook Collection.
Negro-Sarah: Sarah is the main protagonist of the play. The only facts given about her are that she is studying English at a city college in New York, works as a librarian, and lives in a brownstone in the West 90s of Manhattan, and that her mother was white and her father was black. Sarah spends the play confronting her multiracial identity, trying to latch onto her whiteness but failing to escape her blackness. The Duchess of Hapsburg, Queen Victoria, Jesus, and Patrice Lumumba all act as manifestations of Sarah's self.