In the latest issue of Study, a new magazine helmed by French stylist, writer and editor Christopher Niquet, Black women are centre stage. One Black woman in particular, a bona fide genius you’re likely to have never heard of: the formidable, criminally underrated playwright Adrienne Kennedy. Kennedy made her Broadway debut last year with a revival of her play Ohio State Murders. She was 91.
Niquet saw Kennedy’s work on stage for the first time in 2016. Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), her first play, was being staged at the Signature Theatre in New York as part of an Edward Albee tribute. Niquet had been a fan of Kennedy’s writing for years, and encountering it off the page only intensified his interest. “I saw it probably seven times. Each time I was more and more enamoured with the work and what it said,” he tells AnOther. “At the time I saw the work on stage, there was a lot of talk about racism in America. I was so surprised to read the work of someone who wrote [about] these things in the 60s. She was very confrontational with the way she addressed racism in America.”
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