“I was dazzled by Tyrone Power, Black Swan; Rita Hayworth, dancing; Bette Davis, The Letter. But nothing captured as much as when, at eleven, I saw Now, Voyager. On a ship, transformed. I was haunted by ships crossing the ocean, and being transformed. So powerful is that theme that when I finally did cross the Atlantic, on the Queen Mary in 1960, I was determined I would be transformed.” — Adrienne Kennedy
Your must-read of the month: Thomas Beard interviewed playwright Adrienne Kennedy, now 88 years old, for Criterion. And it is a wondrous interview. It’s filled with so much insight – not just about her process, or how she started writing her plays, back in the 60s when the experimental theatre scene in New York was on FIRE – but about the MOVIES, her first inspiration, alongside formative events as a kid like reading Jane Eyre and Secret Garden. Kennedy LIVED the movies – in a way so many of us will relate to – and her love of movies is so directly related to her plays, which often deal with movies – and not just movies – but STARS. She LOVES actors. When she was a child, she felt that Jimmy Stewart in Shop Around the Corner was her friend, her secret friend. Anyway, all that and more in this fantastic interview. Here’s just one section of it:
The movies then became mad clusters of intoxication—the Brando fixation, which included Kazan, the discovery of Sidney Poitier, Montgomery Clift. Living in New York, 1955, I was lost in foreign films for years: Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni. I was then trying hard to write stories. I remember studying Orpheus, Wild Strawberries, La dolce vita, The Leopard, trying to understand the statements they were making about the world.
I definitely felt a distance. It was not like the closeness of Mrs. Miniver or Gaslight, but it was a passion new to me. I wanted to be like the filmmakers. I wanted to create like L’avventura. I was now studying the images of La strada. I felt I was studying the world. I felt I was studying a society, something impossible in Notorious, Suspicion, The Lady Vanishes; the society was there, but I saw only the stories. No more buying spectator pumps because Bette Davis wore them in Now, Voyager. No more trying to do my hair like Paula in Gaslight. I wanted to know what Visconti thought of nineteenth-century Italy, what Rossellini thought of postwar Italy.
I watch some movies again and again. Even though I cannot define it I know those movies are healing me. I know when I see Wild Strawberries I am learning how to compose my disparate memories.
If you haven’t read Kennedy’s work, there’s a very good collection out:
