Kennedy’s most recent work for the stage, “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box” (evocatively directed by Evan Yionoulis, in a Theatre for a New Audience production, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center), is smaller than her previous plays but is shaped like the shimmering and original scripts that made Kennedy’s name in the nineteen-sixties and have kept her in a place of her own in the New York theatre scene ever since. As I watched the two main characters in “He Brought Her Heart Back”—a well-off young white guy named Chris (Tom Pecinka) and a light-skinned black woman named Kay (Juliana Canfield), in the segregated Georgia of the nineteen-forties—my mind drifted to Kennedy’s other plays, the majority of which are suffused with memory and a child’s question: Why can’t life work out, be the dream it should be, like a song? Or, better yet, a movie? – Hilton Als
The New Yorker: Henry IV Review
February 21, 2025
“This production meets the eye humbly, no more than a small stage with two chairs. Then, largely through the force