The panel begins by examining how American drama wrestles with an aesthetic inheritance from the Western tradition that insists that tragedy is only available to the “high born.” In “‘Missing from the Crown’: Sovereign Strands in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro,” Nicole Jerr considers Kennedy’s 1964 groundbreaking expressionist play. Funnyhouse explores the splintering psyche of Sarah, theatrically figured as recurrent hair loss in response to the ritualistic knocking that announces her dead father’s continuous arrival. Four characters, each representing one of Sarah’s selves, reveal the competing perspectives shaping the young Black woman’s understanding of her place in the world. Notably, the four selves are drawn from key historical figures, each with a distinct relationship to sovereignty, both political and spiritual. This presentation will investigate the clashing drives of stature and debasement, colonization and liberation, that will culminate in Sarah’s demise with a specific focus on the way Kennedy’s use of “herselves” sets up parallels and juxtapositions with a dramatic tradition of using sovereign figures as tragic protagonists. Within the American theatrical context, Jerr understands Kennedy’s Funnyhouse to be in conversation with Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920), another expressionist tragedy that similarly explores the relationship between race and sovereignty.

Building on Jerr’s discussion of tragic form, Rebecca Kastleman’s paper, “The Rosary in the Gutter: Profaning Rituals in Tennessee Williams,” takes up the subject of desecration in two of Williams’s works: the “slapstick tragedy” The Mutilated (1966), and an earlier one-act, Thank You, Kind Spirit (1941). In The Mutilated, the debauched protagonist kicks her estranged friend’s rosary beads into the orchestra pit; suddenly beset by remorse, she climbs into the pit, figured diegetically as a gutter, and retrieves the rosary to “tell” the beads. This scene emphasizes the persistent claims of Catholicism on Williams’ dramaturgy – The Mutilated concludes with an apparition of the Virgin Mary – and yet the rosary, like the play’s protagonists, is also “mutilated” in this drama, sullied through its contact with the theatrical space beyond the proscenium. Kastleman explores how Williams’ tragedies both dramatize and desecrate ritual practices, tracing this double movement between consecration and profanation across his work. Turning to Thank You, Kind Spirit, a play about a Black spiritualist and her followers, Kastleman shows how this understudied piece, far from being marginal to Williams’s drama, reveals how the playwright conflated ritual practice with Black subjectivity, while also figuring the charged oscillation between ritual and iconoclasm as foundational to his notion of tragedy.

The panel concludes with a paper by Kristen Wright, “The Sign In Sidney Brustein’s Window: Examining Hansberry’s Fractured Selves.” As Wright shows, Lorraine Hansberry’s 1964 play is regarded as multiple things: a rough draft, a “play about white people,” a snapshot of Greenwich Village life in the 1960s. But in this capacious, rangy play about a group of misfits trying to make it, we see a rich prism of Hansberry’s multiple identities: Sidney is dealing with chronic illness and political disillusionment; Iris, his wife, is desperate to make it in the entertainment industry and feels fetishized by Sidney; Iris’ sisters Mavis and Gloria are hiding deep secrets behind their respectable, middle-class exteriors. Instead of regarding Brustein as an odd, incomplete coda to a promising career that ended too soon, Wright argues, audiences must understand this work as Hansberry’s most personal play. In reflecting Hansberry’s deepest desires at the end of her life, Brustein also invites us to recognize the fractured selves of her characters as pivotal to her use of tragic form.

The panel’s Presider, Marc Robinson, will facilitate a discussion across these three papers that explores the dramatic affordances and performative effects of American tragedy in the 1960s. Together, the panel aspires to prompt a reassessment of modern American tragedy that recognizes its formally and politically radical potential.