Set in Georgia and New York City in 1941 this heartbreaking memory tale of segregation and doomed love braids together Jim Crow, sexual hypocrisy, and the lingering shadow of a terrible crime. The world premiere of her first new play in a decade is directed by Evan Yionoulis who staged the award-winning TFANA production of Kennedy’s Ohio State Murders.

Running Time: Approximately 45 minutes with no intermission.

After nearly a decade away, Adrienne Kennedy reasserts herself as a singular, seminal voice in the American theatre with He Brought Her Heart Back, now onstage at Polonsky Shakespeare Center’s Theatre for a New Audience. In barely 50 minutes, the play — Kennedy’s first since 2008’s Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles?, which she co-wrote with her son, Adam — offers a potent, poetic rumination on the personal and historical traumas we still seem doomed to repeat. To prepare for my first performance from the (perhaps reductively) dubbed doyenne of African-American drama, I dove into her early works, including her Obie Award-winning, 1964 debut, Funnyhouse of a Negro. They are intimidatingly dense plays, rich with shapeshifting characters; enigmatic stage directions and set design; and allusions to the biblical, historical, and mythological. They invite close study, and are therefore often cloistered in university classrooms. Yet this intellectual approach belies the gut-level impact of watching a Kennedy work unfold in real time. Though He Brought Her Heart Back gradually unmoors itself from time and place, it anchors on lovers Chris, played with great humanity by Tom Pecinka, and Kay, …Read more