Funnyhouse of a Negro

KCMPT presents a revival of Adrienne Kennedy’s 1964 Obie Award-winning play Funnyhouse of a Negro at Just Off Broadway Theater May 3^rd – May 18^th.  Directed by Nicole Hodges Persley, Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro is an avant-garde one-act drama about a young African American college student named Negro Sarah who desperately wishes that she was white. The story focuses on Sarah, a young hip graduate of City College who is obsessed with whiteness. We see inside Sarah’s reality in her one-room apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village where talks to her “multiple selves” who are famous people of history including Jesus, The Duchess of Hapsburg, Queen Victoria, and Patrice Lumumba.  As Sarah’s mind twists and turns between reality and fantasy, the audience walks through the funnyhouse of her mind to experience her violent rejection of her blackness and a toxic engagement with whiteness that leads to a point of no return in this captivating one act. Kennedy’s fantastical play explores the psychological trauma of race and identity in America that is amazingly salient today over 50 years after Kennedy’s Obie award for this work.  Funnyhouse of a Negro has become one of the most studied of Adrienne Kennedy plays. The show is rarely performed due to the extraordinary demands of the staging and the text. Local audiences will have the rare opportunity to experience the show’s premier in Kansas City.