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Billie Allen has been intimately associated with one of the most significant plays in African American literature, Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro. In 1964, she created the lead role of Sarah the Negro in the Off-Broadway premiere of Funnyhouse, directed by Michael Kahn, for which Kennedy received her first Obie. In 1984, Allen directed a spirited student production of Funnyhouse at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Then in 2006 she was invited by the Classical Theatre of Harlem (CTH), co-founded in 1999 by Christopher McElroen and Alfred Preisser, to direct a major revival of Funnyhouse, which ran to full houses from January 11 through February 12 (see Fig. 1). The production starred Suzette Azariah Gunn as Sarah, Trish McCaIl as Queen Victoria, Monica Stitch as the Duchess of Hapsburg, Lincoln Brown as Jesus, and Willie Teacher as Patrice Lumumba. From her unique perspective as a member of the original cast and as a director, Allen's insights about the origins and continuing importance of Funnyhouse form a valuable chapter in the history of African American literature and culture. Not surprisingly, she was nominated for the Lucille Lortel award for outstanding director for her production of the play.
Funnyhouse was a profoundly provocative work in 1964 and has become a highly influential one today. Scott Mendelsohn, who reviewed Allen's 2006 Funnyhouse for nytheatre.com (19 Jan. 2006), declared: "Rarely have I felt the complexities of racial identity so compellingly articulated as by Funnyhouse of a Negro." Though Funnyhouse is read and taught at numerous universities around the world, it is, unfortunately, seldom performed. One reason is that Kennedy's highly experimental play radically departs from traditional, sequential plots and realistic characterization, disturbingly transporting audiences into the surrealistic, nightmarish world of the protagonist's subconscious. Sarah desperately tries to escape her own blackness by projecting various selves from both the white world- Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Hapsburg- and her African one as well- Patrice Lumumba. Kennedy's play is a challenging work to study, to teach, to perform.
But Allen's CTH production opened new ways of reading, staging, and interpreting Funnyhouse. According to a review in Off Offline Review, Allen's Funnyhouse "unearths the stark racial torment characteristic of the '60s, civil rights era." In...