In Class With Professor Kennedy

IN 1997, ADRIENNE KENNEDY TAUGHT AN undergraduate playwriting seminar at Harvard. Even on that fancy-pants campus, it was a notable event: Harvard in the late ’90s was a strange place for the theatre folk. The English department thought dramatic writing was declassé (the university proper kept itself completely away from production), and the school offered precious little in the way of creative writing classes at all. The Kennedy workshop was therefore a double rarity. It was also, in my case, a missed opportunity—though I was at Harvard, I didn’t take her class, and I’ve been kicking myself over that bonehead move ever since.

Twenty years later, after seeing her most recent play, I happened to read Kennedy’s diaristic essay “A Letter to Flowers” (2001). It’s a dazzle of moments and refracted thoughts, many achingly sad. “In my mid-60s,” Kennedy starts, “I found myself unable to adjust to my children not being near me. I often thought of not going on.”