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Adrienne Kennedy's intriguing "Funnyhouse of a Negro" is far more a dramatized poem than a conventional drama.
The 1964 one-act play, getting its area premiere from At the Foot of the Mountain theater, is a haunted look inside the fractured mind of a young, light-skinned black woman who is entangled by numerous cultural, historical and personal forces that prevent her from asserting either her race or her individuality.
On the edge of madness, Sarah's mind is inhabited by the presences of Queen Victoria, Charlotte, duchess of Hapsburg, Jesus Christ and Patrice Lumumba. They are symbolic figures who define her position as a black and a troubled soul in a white-controlled America. Victoria's representatives attended the 19th-century conference of European nations that parceled Africa into separate colonial domains. Charlotte was the forceful wife of Mexico's Emperor Maximillian, who went mad when she could no longer...