Adrienne Kennedy

Adrienne Kennedy (born September 13, 1931) is an American playwright.

Quotes

• Oh, the stories—those are an amalgam. I don’t think she would’ve defined herself like that, but my mother was a great storyteller. She always held me captive. She smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes, and she’d always say, “Adrienne, I wanna tell you something.” She is just all over my whole writing career. And my father, because he gave speeches. Really, everything I write is a kind of mixture of his speeches, and her telling me all these stories about Georgia.
  • On how her parents inspired the stories that she writes in “Unraveling the Landscape: A Conversation With Adrienne Kennedy” in American Theatre (September 2019)

• To me, they’re the greatest generation. My parents and their friends, to me, have qualities that I don’t have, my children don’t have. They’re very imaginative, hardworking people. They created so much. My mother could teach all day, and then she could come home and cook a perfect dinner, and her house always looked perfect. They had qualities, I think, that are just so admirable.
  • On her parents in “Unraveling the Landscape: A Conversation With Adrienne Kennedy” in American Theatre (September 2019)

• I have to totally credit that to my mother. There were two children. I was the only girl. And she just always talked to me. She would tell me things that happened to her … her dreams, her past … it’s like the monologues in my plays, it really is. Because her stories were loaded with imagery and tragedy, darkness and sarcasm and humor…
  • On how her mother’s influence appears in her works in “Adrienne Kennedy by Suzan-Lori Parks” in BOMB Magazine (1996 Jan 1)

• The world is always in a turmoil over skin color. The hatred that people feel, I’m not able to articulate it.
  • On how she feels unable to fully articulate racism in “Adrienne Kennedy Talks About Her Life” in The Village Voice (2008 Jan 29)