By the mid-60s, Adrienne Kennedy (b.1931) had won her first Obie award, for Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), while her drama The Owl Answers was being performed at the Theatre de Lys in New York. A producer approached her: “What do you want to write?” Kennedy’s answer led to a trip to London with her younger son, Adam, aged about 10. She had replied: “A play [based on] John Lennon’s nonsense writings.”
Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? (2008) tells the story of how Kennedy’s The Lennon Play: In His Own Write (1967) came to be staged – and its author relegated to its sidelines. Co-written by Adrienne and Adam, Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? records a conversation mother and son had some four decades later, prompted by the question that became its title.
In Diyan Zora’s crystal-clear production, Rakie Ayola is compelling as Adrienne. She moves around an almost empty stage, now hesitantly, eyes searching the space around her for memories; now confidently, reliving events and encounters – with the Beatles and other 60s luminaries. Adrienne seems partly an actor in, partly a spectator of, her own life, as when sitting starstruck next to Laurence Olivier at a dinner where plans to produce her Lennon play at the National are being discussed, after which she realises: “They had already decided I was expendable.”
Seated throughout, Adam listens (Jack Benjamin, sharply focused). At times he accompanies his mother’s words on guitar, highlighting, counterpointing (with Robert Sword’s music). Occasionally he interrupts: “When you say there was a big racial thing, what do you mean?” Adrienne pauses, then: “People were very aware that you were not white… the British thought too many West Indians were moving to London.”
These invisible others are only ever suggested in the text, but their presence resonates throughout. Not everyone has the open sesame of “award-winning American writer” to open doors. Adrienne Kennedy’s very particular, entertaining and moving experiences are also a meditation on the way chance shapes lives, and a challenge to the ways life’s chances are constructed.
