Happy 92nd, Adrienne Kennedy.

Playwright Adrienne Kennedy in Study Magazine nº2, edited by Christopher Niquet, designed by Petronio Associates 

via Idea Books

Adrienne Kennedy Named to Forbes “50 Over 50”

https://www.dramatistsguild.com/thedramatist/adrienne-kennedy-named-forbes-50-over-50

#TheDramatist

Broadway's "Ohio State Murders" Fails to Plunge the Knife in Deep

#frontmezzjunkies reviews: #Broadway's #OhioStateMurdersPlay by #AdrienneKennedy directed by #KennyLeon starring #AudraMcDonald #BrycePickham #LizanMitchell #MisterFitzgerald #AbigailStepenson @OhioMurdersBway #OhioMurdersBway

Audra McDonald in Adrienne Kennedy’s Ohio State Murders. Photo by Richard Termine. The Broadway Theatre Review: Ohio State Murders By Ross The snow falls somewhere in the distance, seen through a vast triangular opening behind a series of floating or falling bookshelves. All of it gives a sense of disquiet to the forefront of peace. It should be settling, but for some reason, there is an edge…

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'Ohio State Murders,' Audra McDonald's Performance is Stunning in This Exceptional Production

'Ohio State Murders' is exceptional, made so by Audra McDonald's stunning performance.

Audra McDonald, Bryce Pinkham in Ohio State Murders by Adrienne Kennedy, directed by Kenny Leon. © 2022 Richard Termine, photo credit. For her first Broadway outing Adrienne Kennedy’s Ohio State Murders has been launched by six-time Tony award winner Audra McDonald into the heavens, and into history with a magnificent, complexly wrought and richly emotional performance. The taut, concise drama…

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“The painting is a mirror. Absorption is self-absorption.”

 from In the Break: Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition by Fred Moten

from top left to bottom right: Adrienne Raquel, Erik Carter, Lucie Fox, Adrienne Raquel, Adrienne Raquel, Adrienne Raquel, Mark Elzey, Kennedi Carter, Marcus Klinko

makeupdept_: So sweet - Thanks @ nalabanana for the blue nail polish!!! @ darrencriss @realityclubfox @biggerstage @namethattunefox @ foxtv New Celebrity serious out now! #glee

shut up i’m thinking about it

.💙

some of my favorite agents of shield fun facts (season 2 edition)

part two!!! [part one is on my page!]

- to show the difference of coulson as the director of shield instead of an agent, they specially tailored each suit, used expensive slim ties, and even tailored his collar to make it higher. they also only made five suits for clark to wear the entire season.

- the cast and crew loved simon kassianides as bakshi so much that they kept his character in the story much longer than planned. he ended up dying five episodes after he was originally supposed to.

- in the episode “Face to Face” where coulson and may are undercover at the party, they made may’s undercover personality based on ming-na wen’s actual personality. a lot of the scenes of may at the party hanging out were unscripted.

- the writers modeled coulson in season two after nick fury, as the new director of shield. the writers made his previous role as a high ranking agent protective of the younger agents more akin to may’s character.

- bobbi wears blue, black, and grey constantly to represent her comic book mockingbird suit. she wears red two twice: while undercover at hydra & when she’s in japan (where she’s pretending to still work for hydra) to show the contrast in her undercover persona and real self.

- the crew and writers modeled the ward family somewhat after the Kennedy’s…what.

- the episode where ward confronts his past is called “The Things We Bury” which is a play on words for a book called “The Things They Carried”, which is a book written about the Vietnam War from the point of view of a soldier (i’ve read the book for a class, it’s a true story).

- the cast (other than adrienne and henry) had no idea mack and bobbi were working for another shield until the episode for the script was sent.

- the day chloe found out that skye would be an inhuman was on the day in season one that an earthquake hit the set. SHE FOUND OUT SHE WOULD PLAY AN INHUMAN WITH QUAKE POWERS THE DAY AN EARTHQUAKE HIT!!

- chloe knew her character existed as a superhero in the comics since she got the role, but she didn’t know which one. at first she thought she could be she-hulk or even mantis but after researching comics she realized she was playing quake a few days before the writers told her she was quake.

- a camera typically films at 24 frames per second. in the scene where skye breaks out of the cocoon in the underground city in puerto rico, the scene was filmed at 1,500 frames per second.

- after trip’s death a lot of the cast thought he would come back again because they said it’s marvel and people come back from dying all the time.

- in the scene filmed on the football field in “One Of Us” it was actually 45° F, which was the record coldest day (at the time of filming) in Los Angeles since 1885.

- lincoln’s character was literally created to give skye a break. they literally realized she’s been through so much in one season that they wrote in a possible boyfriend to make her happy for once.

- one of the writer’s favorite scenes to write was the dinner scene between cal, jaiying, and skye.

- coulson was almost an inhuman. yep. the idea was brought up in the writers room but they decided against it because they liked the idea of coulson being the average man within the craziness that is shield.

this wraps up season two fun facts! i’ll probably post season three when i can!! i don’t really have any plans for the rest of the seasons though :)

Broadway Divas Tournament: Round 2A

Laura Linney (1964) "LAURA LINNEY (Diana) Broadway credits include My Name is Lucy Barton (Tony nom. dir. Richard Eyre): The Little Foxes (Tony nom.) Time Stands Still (Tony nom.) and Sight Unseen (Tony nom.) all directed by Daniel Sullivan at MTC. Other credits include Les Liaisons Dangereauses, The Crucible (Tony nom.), Uncle Vanya, Hedda Gabler, Honour, Holiday, The Seagull, Beggars in the House of Plenty, Six Degrees of Separation. Television credits: "Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City," "Ozark" (SAG, Emmy nom), "The Big C" (Emmy, Golden Globe Awards), "John Adams" (SAG, Golden Globe, Emmy Awards), "Frasier" (Emmy Award), "Wild Iris" (Emmy Award), "The Laramie Project," "Tales of the City" trilogy. Film: Falling, The Dinner, Nocturnal Animals, Sully, Sympathy for Delicious, Morning, The Details, The Savages (Oscar nom), Kinsey (Oscar nom), You Can Count on Me (Oscar nom), The Other Man, City of Your Final Destination, The Squid and the Whale, Jindabyne, Love Actually, Mystic River, The Nanny Diaries, Breach, Man of the Year, The Hottest State, Driving Lessons, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, P.S., The Life of David Gale, The Mothman Prophecies, Maze, The House of Mirth, The Truman Show, Absolute Power, Primal Fear, Congo, Lorenzo's Oil, Dave. Training: The Julliard School, Brown University. Member: AEA, SAG." - Playbill bio from Summer, 1976, June 2023.

Audra McDonald (1970) "AUDRA MCDONALD (Suzanne Alexander) is honored to take part in Adrienne Kennedy's historic and long overdue Broadway debut. A board member of Covenant House International and co-founder of Black Theatre United, McDonald is a singer, actor, and activist who lives in New York with her amazing husband and children." - Playbill bio from Ohio State Murders, December 2022.

NEW PROPAGANDA AND MEDIA UNDER CUT: ALL POLLS HERE

"Do you ever think Laura Linney reads her playbill bio and cries? Does she dream of the day when she too will hold a Tony Award aloft in triumph, or has she resigned herself to being one of four actresses with the biggest fail rate and will one day hold the record outright? (Given that Estelle Parsons is in her nineties, Dana Ivey is in her eighties, and Jan Maxwell, my beloved, is dead?) Anyway, the point of this isn't to rub salt in the wound. Love you, Laura Linney."

"It's too mean to title this poll Biggest Tony Winner vs. Biggest Tony Loser but it's pretty damn accurate, and given the overwhelming whiteness of award shows overall, it's damn satisfying that the Black woman is the one with a record-breaking Tonys on her shelf and the white blonde woman is not (no matter how talented she is). Audra McDonald, my beloved, you're going to sweep this entire tournament."

Lesbian feminism’s negative valuation of butch-fem communities also seems to be a response to the explicit sexuality these communities expressed through butchfem roles. From the beginning, lesbian feminists tended to downplay sexuality between women in an attempt to free lesbians from the stigma of sexual deviance. They separated lesbians from gay men, primarily with respect to the place of sexual expression in men’s and women’s lives. This trend, which became fully elaborated in the 1980s, was central to the identity around which lesbian-feminist politics was built and to the debates that developed around sexuality throughout the entire feminist movement.

In 1980 and 1981, the publication of two works had a powerful impact on the shape of lesbian feminism and on research about lesbian history, Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” and Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men. Both works privileged passionate and loving relationships over specifically sexual relationships in defining lesbianism and explicitly separated lesbian history from gay-male history. Rich’s work is not intended to be an historical study; nevertheless, it proposes a framework for lesbian history. She establishes a “lesbian continuum” that consists of woman-identified resistance to patriarchal oppression throughout history. The lesbian transcends time periods and cultures in her common links to all women who have dared to affirm themselves as activists, warriors, or passionate friends. The place of sexuality in this resistance is not specified and the butch-fem lesbian communities of the twentieth century, because of their use of gender roles, are considered, at best, marginal to women’s long history of resistance to patriarchy. Thus, in this formative work for lesbian feminism, the only group of women in history willing to explicitly acknowledge their erotic interest in women are not central to the definition of lesbian.

from Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy & Madeline D. Davis (2nd ed, 2014; originally published 1994)

if we’ve gotta live underground and everybody’s got cancer/ will poetry be enuf?  // Eisa Davis to Ntozake Shange

         dear ntozake,

I got sacks of mercury under the skin beneath my eyes either cried too much or i’m abt to the cool war’s burnin up my retina again does poetry start where life ends? i know i’m supposed to be cool: i wear corrective lenses that feature high definition tragedy. baby in the dumpster       ethnic cleansing assassinations       multinational mergers i’m supposed to shake my head write a poem believe in ripples. but i ain’t cool. i emit inhuman noises i imagine terrorist acts as i flick my imaginary ash onto the imaginary tray i imagine going insane with a purpose and writing it down feels sorta unnecessary does poetry end where life begins? berkeley girl       black girl        red diaper baby born of the blood of the struggle but with reaganomics and prince pickin up steam in ‘81 nothing came between me and my calvins 10 yrs old       unpressed hair       playin beethoven readin madeleine l’engle       got scared in my pants when i heard this girl testifying ‘TOUSSAINT’ in the black repertory group youth ensemble i was just sittin in a rockin chair pretendin to be 82 and talkin like I knew all bout langston’s ‘rivers’

i wasn’t as good as her and i definitely wadn’t cool so i gave up drama and decided to bake soufflés zake you wda beat me up in the playground if we’da grown up together and you did eighth grade       ‘he dropped em’ at the regional oratorical competition i saw another fly honey rip it this time it’s ‘a nite with beau willie brown’ i was bleedin on the ground i became yours no more soufflés i jacked for colored girls right off my mama’s shelf my mama fania who was sweatin with you and raymond sawyer and ed mock and halifu osumare dancin on the grass       back in the day in you i found a groove never knew i had one like that did that monologue over and over alone in my room my bunk bed the proscenium arch 13 yrs old       screamin and cryin abt my kids gettin dropped out a window didn't know a damn thing about rivers but i knew abt my heart fallin        five stories you were never abbreviated or lower case to me you just pimped that irony that global badass mackadocious funkology you not only had hígado you had ben-wa balls in yr pussy

betsey brown on my godmother's couch nappy edges in mendocino at the mouth of big river spell #7 after the earthquake in silverlake the love space demands had to be in brooklyn yr poems are invitations to live in yr body love letters yr admirers dream they coulda written themselves no one cd find a category that was yr size blackety black but never blacker than thou you teased me into sassiness when i had none to speak of made profane into sacred but never formed a church sanctified women's lives whether we were reading nietzsche or a box of kotex we were magical and regular you many-tongued st louis woman of barnard and barcelona you left us the residue of yr lust left us to wander life as freely as sassafrass cypress and indigo and even the unedumacated could get yr virtuosity cuz you always fried it up in grease you built an aqueduct from lorraine hansberry's groundwater and it bubbled straight to george c wolfe you never read what the critics said and you scrunched up the flesh between yr eyebrows like everybody else in my family

but zake is poetry enuf?

i beg the question cuz you grew me up you    and adrienne kennedy     and anna deavere smith and all my mothers you blew out the candles on my 26th so when there's mercury under the skin beneath my eyes and the world ain't so cool do you write a poem or a will?

like leroi jones said     if bessie smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music so do we all write like amiri baraka does or do we all get our nat turner on?

i beg the question cuz i wanna get my life right do some real work and i really don't want to kill any white folk i mean     can we talk abt this maybe it's just my red diaper that's itchin but i still got that will to uplift the race sans bootstraps or talented tenths or paper bag tests this time we uplift the human race and i know the rainbow might be but is poetry enuf?

it's a naive question but i'm old enuf to ask them once in a while if we do finally unload the canon clean it out stock up on some more colorful balls ain't we only gettin the ones that are available at a store near you? doesn't the market end up setting the new standards anyway? is poetry enuf if it ain't sellin? if ain't nobody readin it? can poetry keep a man     who can't read from droppin his kids out a window?

and how can i call a ceasefire to this cool war in stanzas of eights when we've declared poetry a no fly zone? we have learned to protect it and its potential politics like a mother shoot down anyone who might overdetermine a poem's meaning (while we poets divebomb everyone else's politics with impunity like we're the United States or something)

if poetry is just poetry we save it from the conservatives but doesn't that mean it's of no use to the progressives?

is poetry enuf? cuz that's all i'm doin. makin up stories    on stage     on the page keepin the beat and that's all my friends are doin and that's what a lot of folks my age are doin

but if we've gone and burnt up everything in the sky if there's nothin else to eat but landfill stroganoff if we've gotta live underground and everybody's got cancer will poetry be enuf?

my aunt angela says i can do my thang and keep swinging left hooks to oppression if i stay up stay into it stay involved just one form of praxis will do. it's just my guilt that thinks i need twenty-two what's enuf?

shouldn't i (or somebody) be our secular bodhisattva become a real power player but skip the talk show can't we stabilize, rekindle collectives and cooperatives and collaborations therapeutic communities that double as creative juggernauts a publishing house     a theatre where the plays cost less than the movies get the neighborhood coven back together take dance breaks in the cubicles sing until the flourescent lights burst into snow i ask you because you changed me zake you changed thousands of women and i know poetry can't be enuf if you drunk

i ain't tryin ta walk off wid alla yr stuff and i got nuttin but love for ya so that's why i gotta know i'm sittin on my bed encircled by every book you've ever published they're open like fans marking pages with the flint of genius all i want is for this circle to grow so tell me:

is this where poetry and life are twins? i felt so crumpled up when i started writing you poetry seemed so useless and dingy next to all the bright red bad news but now that the poem is over i feel wide open like an infant of the spring just tell me how to feed this light to my responsibilities and poetry just might be enuf           love           eisa

This book undertakes the first large-scale analysis of women’s agency in Frank Herbert’s six-book science fiction Dune series. Kara Kennedy explores how female characters in the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood―from Jessica to Darwi Odrade―secure control and influence through five avenues of embodied agency: mind-body synergy, reproduction and motherhood, voices, education and memory, and sexuality. She also discusses constraints on their agency, tensions between individual and collective action, and comparisons with other characters including the Mentats, Bene Tleilaxu, and Honored Matres. The book engages with second-wave feminist theories and historical issues to highlight how the series anticipated and paralleled developments in the women’s liberation movement. In this context, it addresses issues regarding sexual difference and solidarity, as well as women’s demand to have control over their bodies. Kennedy concludes that the series should be acknowledged as a significant contribution to the genre as part of both New Wave and feminist science fiction.

Abstract

The purpose of this book is to answer the question of whether the Dune series is feminist through a discussion of the kinds of bodily agency and control the female characters display, linkages with feminist thought, and comparisons with characters in other twentieth-century science fiction. This chapter offers a summary of the six books of the Dune saga, significant critical perspectives on the series, and key texts and theories of second-wave feminism. It justifies the focus on the women of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood and the use of embodied agency as a framework to analyze them. In addition, it provides an overview of the critical narrative of New Wave and feminist science fiction and suggests that the Dune series makes a significant step toward the maturation of the genre through a clear move away from the use of sexist stereotypes and toward a higher quality of characterization, resulting in agential, three-dimensional female characters. It introduces the book’s argument that the series presents a rich and complex speculation on the ways in which women may exert agency that anticipates and parallels similar issues in second-wave feminism.

First Annual Society of the Unnatural Sciences Ball Sponsorship Event - Official Guest List - Taking Place on The Fifth of August

Salutations to those reading this,

It is my distinct honor to welcome you to the First Annual Society of the Unnatural Sciences Sponsorship Ball. This event has been organized hosted by ourselves in an effort to garner interest, excitement, and overall support in our endeavors to explore and research the peculiarities and unexplainable aspects of our own world and to further our understanding of how the world may work outside of our own lenses.

Below is the official list of those that are invited to this event, I apologize if any invitations are arriving late. Please speak with us if you find any arrangements to be not ideal for yourself or if you have any questions about the proceedings.

[Click the read more below the image for the list of names in text form.]

Official Guest List Ophelia Aires Aiden Armstrong Adrienne Ashley Sir Porter Baird Jean Betrand L. Evelyn Bright Mikell Bright Dr. Jack Bright Dr. Adam Bright Samuel Burke Emanuel Burris Lucrezia Cerise Sir Dario Clarke Ms. Leigh Delacruz Fran Dixon Ali Evans Sir Lorenzo Ferri Aditya Frye Maddox Graham Amelia Green Danni Hawkins Mr. Cameron Hill Sam Hood Ethan Horowitz Miss Carol Kelly Gabriela Kelly Abbie Kennedy Lumen L. Ella Lawrence Seymour Leroux Fenrir Lycan Pixel M. Jamie Marsh Matthew Marsh Brett Mathis Italo Mondelli Celine Montoya Mr. Zachary Patel Sir Agnes Peterson Freddie Riley Katie Roberts Dr. Quinn Roy Lady Sharp Isabella Lady Shaw Aimee Roger Sheldon Jude Stewart Dr. Edgar Tainment R. Donna Taylor W. Dr. Emily Tillman Dr. Vittoria Usai Francesco Valtieri Diane Walters F. Williams Denny Woodward

- N. Frost

“we are the ones made of lining and longing and spilled, dirt and hurt tilled for what was done and not quite over.”

— from Dub: Finding Ceremony by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

from left top to bottom right: Adrienne Raquel, Nydia Blas, Shaniqwa Jarvis, Kennedi Carter, Adrienne Raquel, Adrienne Raquel, Chrisean Rose, Jai Lennard, Kennedi Carter, Chrisean Rose, Kennedi Carter