FUNNY HOUSE OF A NEGRO

Funnyhouse of a Negro is Adrienne Kennedy’s best known work.  It was first professionally produced at New York’s East End Theatre in 1964 at the Height of the civil Rights Movement and the emergence of numerous anti-colonial movements worldwide. In the same year it won the Obie Award for Distinguished Play. Kennedy wrote the play in Accra, Ghana and Rome.  Her unflinching script is a hauntingly intimate, fractured glimpse int a sometimes overwhelmingly delicate space.  

Staged at the Arena Theatre in Cape Town in 2010, the racial politics at the heart of the play were inscribed into post-apartheid South Africa.  A series of lyrical, yet desperate protrusions into ‘civility’ triggered by such ‘cultured’ activities as drinking tea.  In this untethered and off-kilter dream play, Sarah The Negro hosted her alter egos, Jesus, Queen Victoria, The Duchess of Hapsburg and Patrice Lumumba, in the ultimate tea party, before the blurring of her subconscious and conscious minds threatened to overwhelm her completely.  The play stages a direct engagement with the psychological hell of internalized racism and exudes all the surrealist and absurd qualities of a nightmare.

• Written by: Adrienne Kennedy
• Directed by: Mwenya Kabwe
• Cast: Chuma Sopotela, Lesoko Seabe, Nadia Woodard, Malefane Mosuhli, Emile Minnie
• Photo Credit: Ingrid Masondo