[1] The play shared this award with Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, and was influenced by her radical imagination; critics have read it in conversation with both the Black Arts Movement and the Theater of the Absurd.
She spends much of the play grappling with her feelings about her mixed ancestry; she idolizes her white mother and despises her black father.
These characters are manifestations of Sarah's self, and include Queen Victoria, the Duchess of Hapsburg, Patrice Lumumba, and Jesus Christ.
[4] Funnyhouse of a Negro takes place in Sarah's mind, allowing the audience to witness the anxiety, entrapment, and alienation of being a black woman in the United States.
Kennedy focuses on the obsession with whiteness and the struggle of mixed ancestry, and the audience ultimately witnesses the complete fragmentation of Sarah's self.
[3] The play opens with a dreamlike sequence of a woman in a white nightgown with long, dark hair crossing the stage.
The conversation between the Queen and Duchess is interrupted by the woman from the opening sequence's knocking and yelling about how she should have never let a black man touch her.
There is also a persistent knocking sound in the background for the rest of the play, representing the father's attempts to return to Sarah's life.
[5] Finally, the Duchess reveals that the mother is currently in an asylum and is completely bald; this explains the significance of the opening sequence of the play.
The audience learns that Sarah is a student at a city college in New York, and that she dreams of being surrounded by European antiques and having white friends.
"[5] Lumumba's speech ends with the claim that Sarah's father tried to hang himself in a Harlem hotel, but leaves ambiguity as to whether he died.
The scene ends with Jesus telling the Duchess that he plans to go to Africa to kill Patrice Lumumba.
The next scene takes place in a jungle, which covers the entire stage, while Sarah's bedroom remains in the background.
Jesus appears, surrounded by the rest of the characters, all with nimbuses on their heads "in a manner to suggest that they are saviors".
[2] The play also dramatizes the sexual economy of racism that constructs blacks as hypersexual and culturally deficient.
At the time the play was written, there was a theme among black playwrights addressing a newly awakened social consciousness manifested in a movement to sustain or rebuild ties with Africa.
[7] Adrienne Kennedy's interest in foreign landscapes crystallized in 1960 while she was aboard the Queen Elizabeth to England, France, Spain, and Africa, and during this trip she drew inspiration for the characters in Funnyhouse of a Negro.
[8] Characters making cameo appearances in the play include Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Anne Boleyn, the King of France, and Chopin.
The play's lack of plot and surrealistic elements are influenced by Kennedy's search for an expressive setting akin to dreams, inspired by her encounter with masks while living in Ghana, as well as various artistic movements of the time.
By casting the white characters with black actors, Kennedy utilizes a form of reverse minstrelsy to represent Sarah's racial identity crisis.
Sarah's need to meet the white standards of society and not have black features overtakes her life and is the driving force behind her thoughts and actions.
Sarah's selves include both female and male characters, representing her internal divide not only between blackness and whiteness, but between femininity and masculinity.
[3] This helps relay the theme of both mental and literal imperialism in the play, as Sarah's mind and body are violated by foreign elements.
Ntozake Shange, Aishah Rahman, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Robbie McCauley were all influenced by Kennedy.
[20] Kennedy's play shows the vulnerability of the black woman, an experience that is still rarely represented in art and media.