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.
