In the mid-1960s, Beatlemania swept through the New York home of playwright Adrienne Kennedy. One of her sons, Adam, would sing I Want to Hold Your Hand; his older brother, Joedy, talked of the Fab Four as if they were the centre of his world. It was a tough time: Kennedy had just separated from the boys’ father and they were about to leave their apartment. But for the eldest child, “the Beatles were all that were on his mind,” she remembers. He treasured his copy of John Lennon’s book In His Own Write, a collection of poems and tales, which she read herself.
“Somewhere in those months of turmoil and Joedy’s passion” Kennedy decided to adapt the book as a play. It was a project that would take her to the heart of London’s theatreland and bring Kennedy both joy and pain. And, in a neat case of symmetry, she revisited this period of her life four decades later in her 2008 play Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? which is presented as a conversation with Adam. “He asked me again and again those questions,” she says. “Finally we decided he would tape my answers.”
This month the one-act play has its UK premiere in Chichester, starring Rakie Ayola and Jack Benjamin. Kennedy, who rarely gives interviews, agrees to answering questions over email. Expansive replies come back speedily, often richly lyrical and idiosyncratically punctuated. Her sense of wonder is still palpable at a chain of events that led her to cross the Atlantic in the 60s and watch a first run-through of the play sat next to one of her heroes, Laurence Olivier: “He. Held. My. Hand.”
Once she had hit upon the idea of adapting Lennon’s book, Kennedy’s New York theatre connections helped her to make contact with Victor Spinetti, who had been in A Hard Day’s Night. He arranged for Kennedy and Adam to meet Lennon who she remembers running into the room for their meeting, sporting an orange jacket. He was “happy to see us”, she remembers. “His face. His eyes so very intense.” The Beatle looked, she says, like a scholar of classical music or a lost language. He was quiet, very serious, and treated her with “a certain deference” that made a big impression on her.
Kennedy was whirling through London’s theatre scene. William Gaskill at the Royal Court had read her controversial play Funnyhouse of a Negro, a fever dream of surreal horror about America’s racism, and wanted her to star in a production. (“I can’t act so declined.”) The West End was wrapped in romance and she felt a frisson of excitement every time she passed The Mousetrap.
Kennedy was writing pages for the adaptation and Kenneth Tynan, then the literary manager for the National Theatre company at the Old Vic, came on board. Spinetti, it was decided, would direct a one-off performance in December 1967, to perhaps be followed by a full run the next year.
Laurence Olivier was the National’s founding director and had been running the company for several years. For Kennedy, he was still Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights – a film that is “fixed in my brain” she says. He was also her mother’s favourite actor. All these years later, she says that meeting him in London was “the most earth-shaking” encounter she has had.
Kennedy couldn’t believe her luck but, about two-thirds into Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles?, her joy begins to drain from the page as she loses control of the project. Meetings start to take place without her. She is no longer the only writer credited on the show. When she visits rehearsals, the play feels different. The contract she has signed is for a one-off Sunday performance rather than the prospective full run.
On that Sunday night, holding hands in the audience with Olivier, “the play flashed before me. I was in a trance. Even today I wonder, was it true.” She wouldn’t see Olivier again. When she called Tynan to ask about the future of the play: “He stuttered and said he was too busy to talk to me and hung up.” The Lennon Play: In His Own Write opened for a full run the following June: her name was on the poster (alongside Lennon and Spinetti as fellow writers) but she declined her invitation.
Looking back, she says she was “living in a fool’s paradise” in London. “I did not know any of those people. I was a Black American woman and had no insight into what those people’s problems were. They understood each other. To Olivier, Tynan and Spinetti, I had 25 pages. And they knew just how to handle that. By accident I had stumbled into this arena. They felt I definitely did not belong. This attitude toward Black women is common in theatre in New York.” What else did the experience teach her? “That theatre was a myriad of competition. And jealousy … In theatre people are fighting. They’re rivals – sometimes rivals long held. A writer must have allies.”
Three years ago this month, the movement We See You, White American Theater was launched to expose racism in the industry and demand equitable working conditions for playwrights of colour. Black playwrights “have most often been dismissed as inferior,” says Kennedy who warns that “the momentary interest” in their plays is “precarious”.
It is 60 years since Kennedy wrote Funnyhouse of a Negro, which won her an Obie award off-Broadway when it was staged in 1964. But, staggeringly, Broadway did not produce one of her works until 2022 when Audra McDonald starred in Ohio State Murders (earning a Tony nomination for best actress). “I basically did not sleep for an entire year,” says Kennedy of the experience. She was finally in the ranks of the playwrights she admired. “Williams, Miller, Wilder, O’Neill. I had held those people close. I secretly wanted what they had.”
Ohio State Murders was staged at New York’s former Cort theatre, which was recently renamed in honour of James Earl Jones – one of the many actors who make a cameo appearance in Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? He had been to see Funnyhouse in New York and Kennedy calls him a “tremendous intellectual” while also enjoying seeing his Hollywood roles in films such as Patriot Games. “Being a movie fan … to see him plotting with Harrison Ford on how to save America was wonderful.”
That 2022 Broadway opening sounds like a light at the end of a tunnel, more than 50 years after what should have been the joyous occasion of her major London premiere. She says she never even read the final version of The Lennon Play, the project which had been sparked by her children’s musical passion. “I had no more interest … It held a darkness.” She had proudly told her own mother about its potential run. On opening night, “she sent me a gigantic bouquet of flowers addressed to the Old Vic. She seemed quite shocked when I tried to explain what had happened, and very let down.”
Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? is at the Minerva, Chichester, 16 June-8 July
