Generic Hybridity in Adrienne Kennedy's drama: The Alexander plays

This study will analyze African-American playwright Adrienne Kennedy's The Alexander Plays (1992), paying close attention to how she experimentally blends literary and dramatic genres. Comprising the one-act plays She Talks to Beethoven, Ohio State Murders, The Film Club, and Dramatic Circle, the tetralogy explores the costs of racist discrimination and violence to African Americans in general, and to African-American women and children in particular. The intellectual and political backdrop of the plays coincides with the years of the Civil Rights Movement, a period which also marked Kennedy's coming of age as an innovative playwright. All the plays feature the autobiographical character Suzanne Alexander as the protagonist. The process whereby Suzanne becomes a politically conscious and artistically sophisticated dramatist is reenacted through Kennedy's juxtaposition of several literary genres and genre conventions of autobiography, creative nonfiction, neo-slave narrative, and gothic fiction on the one hand, as well as the theatrical conventions of expressionism, surrealism, and radio drama on the other.