{"id":598,"date":"2018-05-30T14:08:00","date_gmt":"2018-05-30T14:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/17\/?p=598"},"modified":"2022-02-06T21:29:08","modified_gmt":"2022-02-06T21:29:08","slug":"worth-the-ten-year-wait-adrienne-kennedy-returns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/17\/worth-the-ten-year-wait-adrienne-kennedy-returns\/","title":{"rendered":"Worth the Ten-Year Wait: Adrienne Kennedy Returns"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Derek McCracken<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box<\/em>, by Adrienne Kennedy. Featuring Juliana Canfield and Tom Pecinka. Director: Evan Yionoulis; Set Designer: Christopher Barreca; Costume Designer: Montana Levi Blanco; Lighting Designer: Donald Holder; Composer\/Sound Designer: Justin Ellington; Video Designer: Austin Switser, Dramaturg: Jonathan Kalb. Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn, New York. Opening performance: January 30, 2018.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Compact and courageous, the autobiographical He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box <\/em>could be considered both a culmination of and introduction to the work of prolific 86-year-old playwright Adrienne Kennedy. Box<\/em>, her first new work in a decade, is firmly homed in her historical oeuvre, yet timely and pertinent to the United States\u2019 current violent racial narrative. Directed by Evan Yionoulis, the world premiere at the Theatre for a New Audience (Brooklyn, New York) tempers painful generational trauma with a semblance of optimism and love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Chris (Tom Pecinka)  finds Kay (Juliana Canfield) backstage at the school play. Photo: Gerry Goodstein<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In an interview with playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Kennedy reflects, \u201cI tend to think about the same things I\u2019ve thought about all my life, and I always try to unravel those things.\u201d Onstage, Box <\/em>is more of an unspooling, and the methodical process begins before the house lights dim. Consider the title of the play. Much like the play itself, it is both declarative yet mysterious, challenging us to take it in, but how? What do we make of this information, this assertion? Who is \u201che\u201d? Whose heart? Back from where? Is it macabre, metaphorical? The title, like other elements of cinema and literature embedded in the play, functions as a signifier to what follows: a one-act narrative that engages the audience multi-sensorially, exploring our notion of time, sense of place, reliance on memory and comfort with conflict. Swift and sweeping, Box<\/em> challenges what it means to be human while being stripped of humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Kay on the train. Aherne reads from Marlowe\u2019s Massacre at Paris<\/em>. Juliana Canfield and Tom Pecinka. Photo: Gerry Goodstein<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The play\u2019s two characters come of age in 1941: 17 years old and mutually smitten, Chris (Tom Pecinka) meets Kay (Juliana Canfield). His \u201chandsome, white\u201d and her \u201cbiracial, pretty, fragile, pale\u201d identities are at dangerous odds in the segregated town of Jim Crow-era Montefiore, Georgia. Kay attends a segregated boarding school; Chris works in his father\u2019s storeroom but longs to be an actor in New York. It is apparent when they meet that they know each other (not surprising in a town of 600 people). Both \u201ccome from money\u201d\u2014Kay is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy white man; her mother is deceased. Chris is the son of a town patriarch who is rich and responsible for masterminding the town\u2019s segregation; his mother is also deceased. Young, in love, covert and committed\u2014we\u2019ve seen this before . . . but we\u2019ve never seen it like THIS before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Aherne reads from Marlowe\u2019s Massacre at Paris<\/em>. Tom Pecinka. Photo: Gerry Goodstein<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In Kennedy\u2019s vivid dreamscape, young love aloft is grounded early by inescapable mature matters: institutional racism, generational trauma, family secrets, shame, and the mercurial narrative surrounding the mysterious death of Kay\u2019s mother at the age of 15. It is apparent why the couple courts cautiously: overt flirting could have tragic consequences; boundaries are not to be transgressed. Chris remembers: \u201cI still years later see bodies of the baptized floating down the river, shot because they had the ceremony too close to the land of Crackel Farm. The colored bodies . . . floating . . . only minutes before baptized in Jesus\u2019 name.\u201d As he speaks, a projection of a flowing river consumes the stage. Mercy gives way to undammed waters; we are all awash in complicity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Chris sings \u201cI\u2019ll See You Again\u201d from Bittersweet<\/em>. Juliana Canfield and Tom Pecinka. Photo: Gerry Goodstein<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Chris longs to break the racist patriarchal cycle, telling Kay \u201cI\u2019m going to leave for New York tomorrow Kay. I\u2019m never coming back. I want to go on the stage. I came here because I wanted to see you; I want to write to you, I want to marry you. We could run away and live in Paris after the War.\u201d She accepts his proposal, and they begin sorting through their individual histories, sharing bits of emotional and historical ephemera. In one haunting moment, Chris acts as a sort of puppeteer, manipulating the movements of a primitive white mannequin on stage representing his father. The clothed figure remains seated onstage, a skeleton not in the closet, but in full view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Chris gives an account of the contents of the storeroom. Photo: Gerry Goodstein<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The racial and social divide between Chris and Kay is informed by their situation and reflected by their communication. In the production, it materializes on the thrust stage (empty except for six school chairs delineating the perimeter) that seems to spill over with warm light, overlapping shadows and large-scale cinematic projections. The three-level stage draws our attention down to the schoolhouse cellar where Chris works, up to street level, and further up to New York and beyond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Chris gives an account of the contents of the storeroom. Photo: Gerry Goodstein<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

A stark, open, fully visible staircase leads upstage, flanked halfway up with perpendicular platforms. This forms a 25-step \u201ccross\u201d that both characters ascend and descend, sometimes apart, sometime together. After their initial meeting, the relationship between Chris and Kay seesaws between heartache and hope, attraction and opposition, between needing to be seen and needing to be invisible to be safe. This tension of being the Other in obscurity is familiar to Kay, personally and generationally: \u201cMy great aunt said at my mother\u2019s funeral she saw my father hiding amid the Cedar Trees. She heard him singing, ‘I Come to the Garden.’\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Box <\/em>time hops through both recall and repetition. While Kay rides in the Jim Crow car on a train, Chris writes from New York. They connect to each other (and indirectly to their forebears) by reading letters aloud. This epistolary approach exposes us to their individual oral histories: parallel narratives tainted by structural racism. They are both shackled by their past as they explore their desire for a future together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Chris (Tom Pecinka) remembers the town of Montefiore. Photo: Gerry Goodstein<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Kay (Juliana Canfield) on the train. Photo: Gerry Goodstein<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Along the way, song by song, letter by letter, image by image, Kennedy adds cultural texture via excerpts from works such as Christopher Marlowe\u2019s play Massacre at Paris <\/em>(1593) and No\u00ebl Coward\u2019s 1940 romantic movie Bitter Sweet.<\/em> Being intimately familiar with these artifacts or their themes is not mandatory or even necessary. They help evoke a sense of time and place, and also function as cultural touchstones with limited access within a divided culture: people of color could see the same movie as their white neighbors\u2014as long as they entered the theatre from the back and sat on wooden benches, not in theatre seats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barriers and boundaries permeate Kennedy\u2019s works; Box<\/em> is no exception. In “Forget,” the poem that is included in the Perspectives<\/em> section of the TFANA Playbill, Kennedy writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

we went to his house.
his white wife wanted us to go in the back
door,
but he insisted we come into the front.<\/p>

full of contradictions,
he sent my mother and her half-sister to college,
bought them beautiful things
but still maintained the distance. They called him
by his surname and he never shared a meal with them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLike the South itself,\u201d Kennedy continues, \u201che was an unfathomable mixture of complexities.\u201d Throughout the play, Chris and Kay attempt to reconcile these mixed messages: acceptance with refusal, financial support minus love, needs met without wants realized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Chris (Tom Pecinka) remembers his childhood with his father. Photo: Gerry Goodstein<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Some may balk at the expanse of historical and emotional topography that Kennedy traverses in under 45 minutes. The TFANA production brings the heart of Kennedy\u2019s work back with a seamless and fearless fusion of visual and aural surprises. Like a peek into a zoetrope, blurred scenes smudged with racial oppression gain momentum, disappearing before we have a chance to fully absorb their impact. Yet, we sense that something hasn\u2019t just transpired; it has shifted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Video<\/h6>\n\n\n\n