THEATER
Theater for a New Audience
He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box - Adrienne Kennedy
WORLD PREMIERE
"Set in Georgia and New York City in 1941 this heartbreaking memory tale of segregation and doomed love braids together Jim Crow, sexual hypocrisy, and the lingering shadow of a terrible crime. The world premiere of her first new play in a decade is directed by Evan Yionoulis who staged the award-winning TFANA production of Kennedy’s Ohio State Murders."
“He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box. Now there’s an evocative title for you, conjuring dread, romance and a tragic surrealism all at once. Such is the distinctively poetic and terrifying universe of Adrienne Kennedy.” – Ben Brantley, The New York Times, 5 Shows to See if You’re in New York in January
“[He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box is] the first new play in ten years by the great Adrienne Kennedy, a formative voice in modern African-American drama and the playwright of Funnyhouse of a Negro. Evan Yionoulis directs the new piece, an expansive, heartbreaking memory play set in Georgia and New York in 1941, stretching from Jim Crow to Christopher Marlowe in its exploration of segregation, doomed love, hypocrisy, and desire.” – Sarah Holdren, NY Mag/Vulture, 23 Exciting Productions Taking the Stage in 2018
“Ms. Kennedy is one of the American theater’s greatest and least compromising experimentalists. Her dramas are sites of living history, where personal stories of racism’s unhealed wounds mingle with dark tales thieved from the Brothers Grimm and 1940s Hollywood.” – Alexis Soloski, The New York Times
“Adrienne Kennedy brought to life the depths of black female interiority and the aching humanity of black womanhood.” – Daphne Brooks, Professor of Theater and African-American studies at Yale University as quoted in New York Times
They are at their exquisite peak, this boy and girl stepping through the shadows. They are far enough from childhood to be fully formed but not yet coarsened by adulthood, as delicate of limb and feature as mantelpiece figurines. Only the slight differences in the shades of their perfect skins suggest they are not a matched set.
If you’re thinking that anyone this fine and fragile is destined to be shattered, you are right. You need only listen to what they’re saying, in hypnotic Southern accents to realize that whatever exists between them, it doesn’t have a chance of survival in the early 1940s.
Such is the world that is conjured so unsettlingly in Adrienne Kennedy’s “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box,” her first new work in nearly a decade, which opened on Tuesday at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. Because it has been created by Ms. Kennedy, this landscape is as ugly as it is beautiful, its filigree shaped from barbed wire.
Since she first baffled and electrified New York audiences in the early 1960s with “Funnyhouse of a Negro,” a guided tour of one writer’s enduring nightmare, Ms. Kennedy has been cultivating her own fertile plot in the crowded field of memory plays. Only Tennessee Williams, an early influence, summons a cultural past with such a plangent mix of rhapsody and disgust.
Like Williams’s characters, those who inhabit Ms. Kennedy’s plays are both products of, and misfits in, a circumscribed society. Unlike the typical Williams protagonist, Ms. Kennedy’s leading ladies (as they tend to be) are African-American. Not that any label, ethnic or otherwise, comes close to pinning down identities that are always, dangerously, in flux.
Works like her “Funnyhouse,” “A Movie Star Has To Star in Black and White” and “June and Jean in Concert” seem to take place inside their creator’s mind, at the point where conscious anxiety bleeds into troubling dreams. “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box,” which has been directed with haunting lyricism by Evan Yionoulis for Theater for a New Audience, offers a historical, wider-lens view of the same terrain. Occupying a mere 45 minutes of stage time (Ms. Kennedy’s favorite dramatic form is the short fugue), it nonetheless seems to stretch and bend through generations of conflict.
This is not to suggest that Ms. Kennedy, at 86, has made new concessions to narrative conventions or expository clarity. True, a bare description of her latest subject — a romance between a girl of mixed race and the white scion of the family that rules the town in Georgia where they live — brings to mind a century’s worth of purplish novels about forbidden love.
Ms. Kennedy is susceptible to the pulpy appeal of such fare, and equally contemptuous of it. And as the play’s two characters, Kay (Juliana Canfield) and Chris (Tom Pecinka), tell their respective, overlapping stories, they seem steeped in a sentimental twilight.
Yet often what they say is unyieldingly hard, or else feverish and fragmentary in the way of half-remembered nightmares. In detailed descriptions delivered with perfect, paradoxically languid urgency by Ms. Canfield and Mr. Pecinka, they map the town where they grew up. We learn about its best houses, its streets, its schools and the racially divided town plan, devised by Chris’s father.
We also hear accounts, firsthand and distortingly recycled, of their family histories. And while Chris’s is cushioned in an affluence that Kay has never known, they both carry a legacy of racially mixed sexual relationships. Kay’s father was white, and her mother, who is black, died not long after giving birth to her at 15 — possibly a suicide, possibly a murder victim.
Chris’s father, Harrison Aherne, is both an architect of segregation and a man with black mistresses, by whom he has had several children. He has lovingly overseen the creation of the graveyard in which these women and their families can be buried.
Kay and Chris grew up watching each other from a fascinated distance. T he play follows their tentative courtship, from the eve of Chris’s departure to New York City (he hopes to become an actor) to the moment of America’s entry into World War II. Human and historic events turn out to be intertwined in unexpected ways.
It is important to note that while “Box” is a two-character play (three, if you count Chris’s father, who is represented onstage by a cadaverous dummy), it is not really a dialogue. As Chris and Kay relate the facts and myths of their genealogies, it seems as if they are not connecting through shared history but pushing themselves into ever greater isolation.
As in most of Ms. Kennedy’s work, the narrative is delivered in a kaleidoscope of shards. These take the form of letters, recollections of conflicting tales told by family members, itemized descriptions of a train station, a savage moment from the Brothers Grimm (which gives the play its title), wistful period songs and lines from two very different shows — Noël Coward’s operetta “Bitter Sweet” and Christopher Marlowe’s lurid revenge tragedy “The Massacre at Paris.”
Only Ms. Kennedy, perhaps, could gracefully balance such disparate works as mood-defining reference points of equal weight. And while the implicit connections between Chris’s father and Nazi Germany might feel overly contrived in a more traditional play, here they become natural echoes in a nightmare that enwraps the whole world.
The physical production may be the most ravishing and organic that a Kennedy dreamscape has ever been given, starting with Christopher Barreca’s weathered wooden set, a synecdoche for the miniature model of the town the audience passes on the way to its seats.
Donald Holder’s lighting both anchors this place with projected words and blueprints (Austin Switser is the video designer) and sets it swirling into giddy decomposition. Montana Levi Blanco’s costumes and Justin Ellington’s subliminal music and sound design match and extend the same sensibility.
The stage, by the way, is divided by a long staircase. It looks both solid and spectral, daunting in the way a child might perceive a steep flight of steps. It whispers of both the fantasy of escape and the reality of captivity.
Even in stark retrospect, these conflicting elements do not rule out each other. In setting up camp in their intersection, Ms. Kennedy remains one the harshest — and most invaluable — of the American theater’s conflicted sentimentalists.
FORGET
I met my white grandfather a few times.
of course he lived on the white side of town.
he sent his chauffeur who was black and his name was Austin
in a black car to
of course he lived on the white side of town.
he sent his chauffeur who was black and his name was Austin
in a black car to
my grandmother’s house to get us.
my mother wanted my brother, herself, and me to walk
but he insisted.
my mother wanted my brother, herself, and me to walk
but he insisted.
we went to his house.
his white wife wanted us to go in the back
door,
but he insisted we come into the front.
his white wife wanted us to go in the back
door,
but he insisted we come into the front.
full of contradictions,
he sent my mother and her half-sister to college,
bought them beautiful things
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.
by his surname and he never shared a meal with them.
we sat in his parlor twice.
he was slightly fascinated by my brother and me.
he said something like you all have northern accents.
he was interested in our schooling in Cleveland.
he was interested in the fact that people
said I was smart.
he was slightly fascinated by my brother and me.
he said something like you all have northern accents.
he was interested in our schooling in Cleveland.
he was interested in the fact that people
said I was smart.
at that time the thirties and before the WAR
he owned a lot of the town
he owned a lot of the town
and had three children by black women.
my mother’s mother was fifteen, worked in the peach orchards.
my mother’s mother was fifteen, worked in the peach orchards.
like the South itself, he was an unfathomable.
mixture of complexities,
these are two generations of white men
removed
mixture of complexities,
these are two generations of white men
removed
who went all the way to Africa to get SLAVES,
quite mad.
quite mad.
I was lucky enough to spend a day and evening in his
and his family’s house. built about 1860
where he was born . . . his father was the town’s first bank owner.
and his family’s house. built about 1860
where he was born . . . his father was the town’s first bank owner.
the house, white, wooden in weeping willow trees
down a long archway.
down a long archway.
by 1940, when I visited, the house had one usable
room, the rest all boarded up
and was lived in by black COUSINS
of his Negro family.
room, the rest all boarded up
and was lived in by black COUSINS
of his Negro family.
despite her Atlanta Univ education and marrying a Morehouse man
and making a nice life in Cleveland,
my mother found it impossible to say her mother’s name.
and impossible to call her father by anything but his
surname.
she used to say to me when I was a child,
Adrienne, when I went to town to get the
mail, they would always say
here comes that little yellow bastard.
and making a nice life in Cleveland,
my mother found it impossible to say her mother’s name.
and impossible to call her father by anything but his
surname.
she used to say to me when I was a child,
Adrienne, when I went to town to get the
mail, they would always say
here comes that little yellow bastard.
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