The Adrienne Kennedy play Funnyhouse of a Negro demonstrates the playwrights attempt to create a portrayal of a reality beyond human comprehension through the use of various dramatic tools. Setting is a crucial tool for the playwright as she provides us with the story of a young black female student who is tortured over her identity crisis. The product of a rape, her mother goes insane and her father commits suicide, as she will eventually do. Torn between various selves (Jesus, Queen Victoria, the Duchess of Hapsburg, and Patrice Lumumba), the settings are conflicting and separate as well: Queen Victoria’s bedroom chamber, the chandelier ballroom of the Duchess of Hapsburg, a student’s room in a New York brownstone boarding house, and an African jungle.
The various locales are meant to represent or symbolize the various state’s of mind experienced by the character. Through makeup, lighting, setting, and dialogue we are presented with an environment that is dreamlike but often nightmarish. In the stage directions Kennedy notes “the middle of the stage must be lit by a white light so strong, it is unreal and ugly, while the rest of the stage is in strong unnatural blackness” (192). We can see that this is a highly symbolic use of setting because Sarah, the student, is lost in her own blackness which she has internalized as unnatural due to the racist environment in her reality. We see the same effect to recreate the reality that is slightly beyond human comprehension in the way that the characters’ costumes and make-up make them symbolize or represent various psychological states or realities of the main characters. Jesus is a hunchback and dressed in rags. Patrice Lumumba has a gash in his head and blood pours from his eyes. Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Hapsburg, both meant to symbolize white imperialist oppression and racism, look identical – china white faces and fri
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