God and the Owls: The Sacred and the Profane in Adrienne Kennedy's The Owl Answers

Abstract

Adrienne Kennedy has commented about her 1965 work The Owl Answers that it is her favorite play, even though it has been overshadowed by the 1964 work Funnyhouse of a Negro. She has also quoted Joseph Papp as commenting that Owl is her best-written play. Despite Kennedy's interest in the play, and its own merits, Owl has not received as much attention as has her breakthrough play Funnyhouse, although it treats similarly provocative issues of gender, race, and identity. Except for Robert L. Tener's discussion of it, Owl is usually treated in passing in conjunction with several of Kennedy's plays, such as Funnyhouse. A MovieSlar Has 10 Star in Black and While, Lesson in a Dead Language, A Rat's Mass, or the play with which Owl was originally coupled for performance, A Beast StOlY. The most extensive critical examinations of Owl thus far, besides Tener's, have appeared in articles by Elin Diamond, Susan E. Meigs, Rosemary Curb, and Kimberly Benston, and book chapters about Kennedy by Marc Robinson and Linda Kintz. Most of these discussions note the mergings and fracturings of identity (or of "identification," as Diamond discusses) within the characters of this drama. While Kintz examines the effects of "the myth of purity" on Clara's subjectivity, Benston discusses Kennedy's style of theater, its use of symbolism and its "psychological mode," especially in regard to its effects on the audience. For those readers/viewers already familiar with Funnyhouse, it is immediately clear when examining The Owl Answers that it explores some of the same terrain in that the main character, a young woman, is tom between conflicting desires for acceptance in the white world and her mixed-racial heritage. Curb sums up the duality of the fragmented identity that torments Clara in Owl as being that between the Virgin Mary self and the Owl self, where the owl represents "her black, African, Negro side and her evil, sensual, bestial female side."