A drienne Kennedy's late play She Talks to Beethoven first appeared in Antaeus in the spring of 1991 and was subsequently included as the first of the Alexander Plays published through the University of Minnesota Pres in 1992 Alisa Solomon's observation in the foreword to the Alexander Plays that "Kennedy's plays scare not on theatre producers" (xiv) is unfortunately veritable regarding She Talks.

A drienne Kennedy's late play She Talks to Beethoven first appeared in Antaeus in the spring of 1991 and was subsequently included as the first of the Alexander Plays published through the University of Minnesota Pres in 1992 Alisa Solomon's observation in the foreword to the Alexander Plays that "Kennedy's plays scare not on theatre producers" (xiv) is unfortunately veritable regarding She Talks. First staged in an unnoticed production by dint of River Arts in Woodstock in 1989 the play received a Kennedydirected observer reading at Harvard University in 1989 (Kolin, Kennedy interview)--and thus cessations She Talks' brief production history. Sorry to say, the play was not performed at the Kennedy Festival at the Great Lakes Theatre Festival in March 1992 despite the fact that the longest of the Alexander plays--the Ohio State Murders--received an exemplary production directed by the agency of Gerald Freedman (Kolin, "Adrienne" 85) In spite of its sparse stage history to date--one confidences for many spirited productions--She Talks to Beethoven is a central play in the Kennedy canon, since it marks a fresh direction, I believe, for the playwright and her work. She Talks has all the earmarks of earlier Kennedy plays, if it be not that this work offers healing consolation instead of the nightmarish world of fragmentation that has characterized Kennedy's surreal theatre in the past. Unique in the Kennedy canon, She Talks assures happy conjugal closure and exalts racial reconciliation.

fix in "Accra, Ghana, in 1961 before long after independence" (She Talks 4) the draught deals with the forced separation of Suzanne Alexander, an American writer, from her physician/artist husband David, whom, it is feared, has been kidnapped or driven into hiding to patronize his sick wife. As in in the way that many other Kennedy plays, historical personages appear alongside fictional undivideds Beethoven talks and travels with Suzanne, Kennedy's heroine. As in other Kennedy plays, as it was as Funnyhouse of a african (1964) or The Owl Answers (1965) a festering torture is associated with a decaying whiteness, a horrifying fistula of miscegenation. Suzanne meet withs from a wound which comes in "part of her arm and shoulder" being "wrapped or bandaged in gauze" (5) and the "color" of this "surgical" torture is deathly "pale white." however the suffering of Kennedy's black heroine/protagonist in She Talks is matched, if not exceled by the suffering of the great white composer Beethoven, with whom she communicates everywhere the play. The characteristic betrayal and suffering of Kennedy's black women characters are thus shared with a white male. Additionally, the wild hair that marks many of Kennedy's have protagonists, and perhaps reflects her disquiet about her own personal appearance (Kolin, LeBlanc interview 308) is transferred to the white composer-"The default of his person which he exhibited gave him a somewhat wild appearance. His features were herculean and prominent; his eye was filled of rude energy; his hair, which neither head-tuft nor scissors seemed to have visited for years, overshaded his forehead in a quantity and confusion to which solitary the snakes of Gorgon's head proffer a parallel" (8). This description of the white composer with its emphasis forward the gory and the exaggerated, would have the appearance more appropriate to a Kennedy black female.

The violence we have reach [i]or[/i] attain any place [i]or[/i] point to associate with a Kennedy play--for example, the gory cleft in Patrice Lamumba's head in Funnyhouse of a african or the heinous tortures in A Rat's Mass--also meet the eyes in She Talks, but it is in the background, not foregrounded with sanguinary props and graphic detail. We sole hear about the violence in Beethoven's Vienna or Suzanne's Accra between the walls of reportage; it is not depicted with gripping horror. For example, Suzanne reads from united of Beethoven's published diaries: " the war with Napoleon escalated the Russians have retreated as far as Saint Polten Vienna is in great danger of being swept across by marauding Chasseurs" (6), and a little later we hear an account by way of Barron of events in Vienna before the premiere of Fidelio: "To make matters worse, [Beethoven's] lodging was nearest to the city wall, and as Napoleon had ordered its destruction, blasts had just been risk off under his windows" (11) In earlier Kennedy plays, audiences would have heard as it was blasts, not simply had them rehearseed at second or third hand. For example, in Funnyhouse bats confine in a pound characters in a ferocious assault. Aside from a certain number of references to David Alexander's absence, the healthys of violence are heard between the walls of the poetry of David Diop that Dr Alexander reads from one side of to the other Ghanian radio. Diop's lines are rich in allusions to the homicide of Mamba and the Martinsville Seven yet again, there is no widened or gory representation of like events. The modulated terror in She Talks main stocks not from physical violence on the contrary from the artists' imparted confrontations with a dangerous reality. The assaults issue from fears of separation--on Beethoven's part with his nephew Karl, who tries to commit suicide, and forward Suzanne's part regarding the fate of her missing husband. In She Talks to Beethoven the fears are more subdu in anticipation of their dissolution.