BLACKOUT: Utopian Technologies in Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro

In the second-to-last episode of Funnyhouse of a Negro, Adrienne Kennedy asks for the impossible. The oxymoronic effect of "a dark brightness" lies outside the realm of the technically possible. What combinations of lights, gels. and focus techniques might create "a dark brightness"? The requirement of "brightness" eliminates the possibility of "dark." This example is not the first time in her 1964 one-act that Kennedy requires the practically impossible. In her play, bald heads drop from the sky, black ravens fly around stage, walls appear out of nowhere and then characters walk through them. This is not to say that creative theatre professionals can't or won't come up with practical. elegant solutions to these staging problems. Indeed, Kennedy's impossible stage directions incite creative solutions, unique, unanticipated renderings of her imagined play in the material theatre. Nor is it to imply that the central work of theatre is to follow a playwright's stage directions as closely as possible. Creative solutions to impossible requirements include both "faithful" and "unfaithful" renderings. Rather, these impossible requirements highlight an impulse that lies at the core of theatrical representation: the impulse to substantiate or render the ideal. In the possibility that subtends that impulse is, I think, a utopic sensibility — a sense that something different or better could come out of current conditions.