In the following essay, Brown sees the play as a world in which "Blackness, femaleness, and education are equally important isolating factors."

For the days are past when there are places and characters with connections with themes as in the stories you pick up on the shelves of public libraries. . . . There is no theme. No statements. . . . For the statement is the characters and the characters are myself.

These words spoken by Sarah, the young Negro student, in Adrienne Kennedy's play, Funnyhouse of a Negro, apply both to Sarah's own troubled personal world and to the felicitous form of the play itself. An ornate dramatic image, reflecting kinship with and absorption of the work of Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet, this original and penetrating play makes use of surrealistic and expressionistic modes to explore the mind and emotions of an educated Black girl. The play projects a world...