Hilton Als: Celebrating the Life and Work of Adrienne Kennedy: The New Yorker In 1987, while working as an assistant in the Village Voice's art department, I came across a strikingly laid-out book. It had photographs of unknown black people mixed in with photographs of movie stars like Ingrid Bergman, Clark Gable, and Judy Garland. It was a memoir, of sorts, called "People Who Led to My Plays," by Adrienne Kennedy. I had never heard of her. This was the first paragraph: "More and more often as my plays are performed in colleges and taught in universities, people ask me . . . who influenced you to write in such a nonlinear way?" The book itself - a gorgeous amalgamation of black-American history, culture, and dreams - was nonlinear. I had never read such a representation of what it must be like for my sisters to live in the world - and I felt the same shock of recognition when I saw Kennedy's plays. Following her marriage, in 1953, to Joseph Kennedy, a professor, Adrienne Kennedy left her native Ohio for New York, and then moved to Ghana. This was in the heady days of pan-Africanism, and, by the time Kennedy returned to New York, the images that had accumulated in her head throughout so many voyages - a surreal world filled with family secrets, the evils and mysteries of European and religious history, the vulnerability and terror felt by black females - came together in her first major one-act, "Funnyhouse of a Negro," which she wrote in 1961. The Obie Award-winning play was co-produced in 1964 by Kennedy's then mentor, Edward Albee. It launched her career. Kennedy went on to make experimental theatre at odds with the Black Arts Movement of the same time, which was spearheaded by Amiri Baraka in 1965. The movement called for a distinctly revolutionary theatre that reflected black life, especially following Malcolm X's death and the race riots in Harlem. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Kennedy made work - such as "A Lesson in Dead Language" and "An Evening with Dead Essex" - that had almost nothing to do with ideology. Her focus has always been on dislocation and femaleness. Her protagonists live in a surreal sphere where their bodies are at the mercy of their imaginations. They have been undone by racism; the ever-present spectre of Europe, with its "real" history and authority; American movies; and the hysteria, fear, and attraction underlying what light-skinned women think of their darker-skinned fathers or partners. In her 1976 masterwork, "A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White," Kennedy takes some of the white-movie-star power that flooded her dreams as a child, changes it around, and puts the spotlight on a twisted, powerful femaleness. None of the male movie stars speak in the play. Indeed, one of the characters in the piece is Bette Davis, but Bette's parents are black, and she wonders aloud if, when she has her baby, she'll "turn into a river of blood and die." In 1976, La Mama hosted an operatic version of Kennedy's outstanding 1966 play "A Rat's Mass," directed and composed by Cecil Taylor. Now, on Jan. 25, La Mama will present a panel that addresses Kennedy's life and work. Meanwhile JACK, a new arts center in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, is producing a revival of her 1989 play, "She Talks to Beethoven." Essentially a monologue, the piece deals with the same emotional territory that Kennedy covers in her memoir: the disparate elements of a mind at war with itself, and a body at war with that mind, trying to come to some kind of truce in a battle-scarred world. ♦