Adrienne Kennedy's First New Play in Nine Years to Play Theatre for a New Audience

Theatre for a New Audience will present He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, the first new work in nine years from Adrienne Kennedy.

Set in Georgia and New York City in 1941, He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box is a heartbreaking, nail-biting memory tale of segregation, theatrical yearning, and doomed love. The action, driven by parallel monologues and a tour through a storeroom of charged images, braids together the indignities of Jim Crow, rising Nazism, sexual hypocrisy, Christopher Marlowe, and the lingering shadow of a terrible crime.

Evan Yionoulis, who staged the OBIE- and Lucille Lortel Award-winning revival of Kennedy's Ohio State Murders for TFANA in 2007, directs this world premiere production, January 18-February 11, 2018, at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, TFANA's first permanent home. Tickets are on sale now at www.tfana.org, 866.811.4111 and the Polonsky Shakespeare Center box office. TFANA will announce casting and creative team soon.

In her landmark 1960 play Funnyhouse of a Negro, Adrienne Kennedy, now 86, created her own nonlinear form of storytelling to explore race and segregation in America. First produced just before the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, that play was the beginning of Kennedy's sustained exploration of mixed identities and fluidity of the mind in conflict with rigid stratifications of society.

Kennedy's writing is just as indispensable today as when Funnyhouse made manifest the psyche of a woman caught between polarized identities. If ever there were a time to consider Kennedy's contributions to the discourse about racial conflict and violence in America, it is now.

In an interview with Suzan-Lori Parks, for BOMB Magazine in 1996, Kennedy explained, "My mother told me complex, violent stories of her dreams and of her childhood. They were loaded with imagery and tragedy, darkness and sarcasm and humor. She could describe a day when she was sitting on her porch in Georgia and what happened ... and my father always gave speeches about the cause, the Negro cause. So, there is no doubt in my mind that I try to merge those two things. I'm genuinely fascinated and I will always be-by that pool of stories I heard when I was growing up." Family is an important component of Kennedy's work. She collaborated with her son on her OBIE-winning play Sleep Deprivation Chamber, about his having been followed, beaten, and wrongly arrested by the police. She wrote He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box for her teenage grandson, Canaan Kennedy, himself a writer.

Through monologues delivered by lovers-Kay, a biracial seventeen-year-old girl, and Chris, a white seventeen-year-old boy whose father is the "architect of segregation" in their small town-He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box largely mines the social and physical makeup of a small town in Georgia, itself a miniature of the America's structures of Jim Crow-era oppression. In her interview with Parks, given long before He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box was written, Kennedy described that that her "mother was the illegitimate child of a wealthy white landowner in Georgia. [And] her mother was a young woman who worked in his peach orchards...That town has a mythic quality to it. It has that red sand and the cornfields, all those white buildings."

That quality is transposed into beauty and horror in He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box through the accounts of Kay and Chris. As the play's fluid setting shifts from a production at a boarding high school for the biracial children of wealthy white fathers, to a storage room packed with images of segregation, to a dressing room in a New York theatre, Kay and Chris spell out their family histories in chilling juxtaposition. Bits of Christopher Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris-the 1593 play about the mass murder of the Huguenots, following the marriage of the Protestant Henry III of Navarre and the Catholic French King's sister, Margaret of Valois-course ominously through Kennedy's new work.

Performances of He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box will take place January 18-21, 23-27, 30 & 31, and February 1-4 and 6-11 at 7:30pm; January 28 at 7pm; and February 3, 4, 10 and 11 at 2pm. Critics are welcome as of January 27 for an official opening on January 30. Polonsky Shakespeare Center is located at 262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn, NY 11217.

Tickets, $90-100 (with a limited number of premium seats available at $125 each), are available at www.tfana.org, 866.811.4111 and the Polonsky Shakespeare Center box office. New Deal tickets-for those aged 30 and under, and for full-time students of any age-are available for all performances for $20, and can be purchased online, by phone or at the box office, in advance or day-of, with valid ID(s) required at pickup.

Companion Programming:

TFANA Talks, free post-show conversations, will take place after the Saturday matinee performances on February 3 (moderated by Alisa Solomon) and February 10 (moderated by Jonathan Kalb).

After the 7:30pm performance on Sunday, January 21, TFANA will host one of its popular Post-Show Parties. Every ticket purchased for that evening includes a drink ticket for use at the party.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Adrienne Kennedy has been a force in American theatre since the early 1960s. She is a three-time Obie award winner, including for Funnyhouse of a Negro in 1964, June and Jean in Concert in 1996 and Sleep Deprivation Chamber which she co-authored with her son Adam Kennedy. Among her honors are the American Academy of Arts and Letters award, a Guggenheim fellowship, an Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003 and a Modern Language Association Honorary Fellow in 2005. She has been a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University, among others and has been commissioned by The Public, the Royal Court, Juilliard and by Jerome Robbins. Signature Theatre devoted its entire 1995-96 Season to her work. Her memoir People Who Led To My Plays was recently reissued by Theatre Communications Group. On this occasion, she would like to remember Jim Houghton's kindness and thoughtfulness; his interest in her work changed her life.

Evan Yionoulis has directed new plays and classics in New York, across the country, and internationally, including Richard Greenberg's The Violet Hour (Broadway), Three Days of Rain (OBIE Award for direction, Manhattan Theatre Club), and Everett Beekin (Lincoln Center Theater), as well as Adrienne Kennedy's Ohio State Murders (Lortel Award for Best Revival, Theatre for a New Audience). Regionally: South Coast Repertory, Mark Taper Forum, Dallas Theater Center, the Huntington, Williamstown, and many others. She is a resident director at Yale Repertory Theatre where credits include Cymbeline, Richard II, The Master Builder, Galileo, Caryl Churchill's Owners and The King Stag. Princess Grace Foundation Awards recipient.

Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) is a modern classic theatre. It produces Shakespeare alongside other major authors from the world repertoire, such as Harley Granville Barker, Edward Bond, Adrienne Kennedy, Richard Nelson, Wallace Shawn and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. TFANA has played Off- and on Broadway and toured nationally and internationally.

In 2001, Theatre for a New Audience became the first American theatre invited to bring a production of Shakespeare to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), Stratford-upon-Avon. Cymbeline, directed by Bartlett Sher, premiered at the RSC; in 2007, TFANA was invited to return to the RSC with The Merchant of Venice, directed by Darko Tresnjak and starring F. Murray Abraham. In 2011, Mr. Abraham reprised his role as Shylock for a national tour.

After 34 years of being itinerant and playing mostly in Manhattan, Theatre for a New Audience moved to Brooklyn and opened its first permanent home, Polonsky Shakespeare Center, in October 2013. Built by The City of New York in partnership with Theatre for a New Audience, and located in the Brooklyn Cultural District, Polonsky Shakespeare Center was designed by Hugh Hardy and H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture with theatre consultants Akustiks, Milton Glaser, Jean-Guy Lecat, and Theatre Projects. Housed inside the building are the Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage (299 seats)-the first stage built for Shakespeare and classical drama in New York City since Lincoln Center's 1965 Vivian Beaumont-and the Theodore C. Rogers Studio (50 seats).

TFANA's productions have been honored with Tony, Obie, Drama Desk, Drama League, Callaway, Lortel and Audelco awards and nominations and reach an audience diverse in age, economics and cultural background.

Theatre for a New Audience created and runs the largest in-depth program in the New York City Public Schools to introduce students to Shakespeare, and has served over 130,000 students since the program began in 1984. TFANA's New Deal ticket program is one of the lowest reserved ticket prices for youth in the city: $20 for any show, any time for those 30 years old and under or for full-time students of any age.

To post a comment, you must register and login.