In the following essay, Meigs treats Sarah's multiple selves as masks that represent an imprisonment that keeps Sarah, like many African-American women, from having the power "to resolve the chaotic elements of their black female identities."

I know no places. That is I cannot believe inplaces. To believe in places is to know hope and to know the emotion of hope is to know beauty. It links us across a horizon and connects us to the world. I find there are noplaces only my funnyhouse

Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro

In 1960, while dramatists were forging a rhetoric of black theater from the emerging black power movement, twenty-nine-year-old Adrienne Kennedy travelled to Africa with her husband and son. The trip would prove to be the catalyst for her career as one of America's most complex contemporary playwrights. At the time of her trip, Kennedy had been writing...