Adrienne Kennedy has written a number of dark, brooding dramas, including Funnyhouse of a Negro and Ohio State Murders. Her 2018 play He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, however, is truly Gothic.
One of the things I love about the play is its use of Christopher Marlowe's tragedy The Massacre at Paris, sometimes called Paris Massacre. In Kennedy's play, a group of school children are performing Marlowe's work just offstage, and the lines hauntingly comment upon the present action.
The Massacre at Paris is an odd play for a school to produce, but as Kennedy notes in her stage directions, the piece "was chosen for unknown reasons" by the man who controls the school's governing committee and who lurks in the shadows through much of the story. Kennedy's play opens with lines recites by the Duke of Guise in Marlowe's work:
Although my downfall be the deepest hell
For this I wake when others think I sleep
For this I wait that scorns attendance else
For this my quenchless thirst... whereon I Build...
Harrison Aherne, the Gothic villain who chose that play to be performed, is a builder, and has made sure that the town of Montefiore, Georgia, where much of the action takes place, will enforce strict racial hierarchies. Like the Duke of Guise, his thirst for power seems to know no limits. Later, we hear lines spoken by the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici:
My noble son and Princely Duke of Guise,
Now have we got the fatal straggling deer
Within the compass of a deadly toil
And as we late decreed, we may perform.
What they plan to perform, of course, is the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, when Roman Catholics slaughtered Protestants in the street. This is an ominous beginning to a play that deals explicitly with the Jim Crow South right before the U.S. entered World War II. Aherne's son, Christopher, shares Marlowe's first name, and like the playwright, he can sometimes be difficult to pin down on exactly how he feels about the events he describes.
Those events involve racial oppression and hints of murder, though many specifics remain tantalizingly elusive. I won't give away the play's shocking ending, but will note that it returns to Marlowe's words at its close.
Kennedy is once of our greatest living dramatists, and her works should be performed more often.
