The New York Times: The playwright Adrienne Kennedy never wanted to move to Virginia. She spent 30 years living on the fourth floor of a brownstone on West 89th Street — her “little Victorian palace,” she called it. But the rent went higher. Her breath on the stairs came shorter. Just before she turned 80, she traveled down to Williamsburg, Va., to visit her younger son, Adam Kennedy, and she stayed.
“Unfortunately, I’ve been here six years,” she said. “I hate it.”
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I think the main thing that I got out of this article was how your personal experiences effect your work and how the experiences of others can also effect your work. This is what makes art unique and one of a kind because no two people have the same experience so therefore no two people can create the same original art. Sometimes when something hard happens in your life or the lives of others close to you, you tend to block the experience out and try to forget about it. But this is not what Kennedy did. She took all of her experiences some of the good ones and a lot of the harder ones and turned them into powerful works of art that get to inspire and provoke thought of all that get to see them. I think this is easier said than done. In order to really pull from the hard experience you have to be willing to let them in and think about them, but that is what art is sometimes, the ability to be vulnerable.
I first ran across this article when I was looking through my parent’s New York Times subscription last week. The first thing about it that I really loved was Alexis Soloski’s ability to capture the essence of Adrienne Kennedy. I felt like I was able to have a true and unique view into her life as a professional and as a person. I was amazed at the thoughtfulness that Ms. Kennedy seemed to have towards Soloski, especially with the photographs that she brought of Barbara Stanwyck. I appreciated the critical eye that Ms. Kennedy addressed her surroundings with, and her lack of fear in explaining her true observations of the world and her place in it is refreshing. Her ability to write is supported by her truest and most unfiltered surroundings, and she speaks of the catharsis that is her writing process: everything boils inside until it all emerges. She believes firmly in representing reality, meaning there are no happily ever after’s, especially with the “plight still of American blacks is a tragic plight.” She cannot write without vigor, and she is in a place of awe over the attention her work still receives because of the impact it leaves on its viewers.
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