It's not surprising that the latest Adrienne Kennedy play, written in collaboration with her son Adam, is autobiographical. Many of her works, such as Funnyhouse of a Negro, The Owl Answers, A Rat's Mass, and A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, are derived from her growing up as an African-American woman in Ohio. But what sets Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? apart from her other pieces is its simplicity. Those earlier plays are phantasmagorical and fragmentary, with figures from fantasy, history, and pop culture interacting with more-realistic characters in a poetic dreamscape.
In Beatles, Brenda Pressley as the author stands center stage at a lectern reading from a script. The subject is Kennedy's sojourn in late-1960s London, accompanied by Adam, who was a little boy at the time, to write a play based on a book of nonsense verse by John Lennon. No one like Anne Boleyn or Bette Davis pops up to offer coded commentary.
Kennedy runs into a slew of celebrities, eventually hooking up with Kenneth Tynan, the influential drama critic and co-director with Laurence Olivier of the fledgling National Theatre. Kennedy meets all four Beatles and her childhood idol, Olivier, when the National stages the Lennon piece. She revels in the Fab Four's charisma and the vitality of the British capital, then the center of an exciting shift in music and theatre. But her idyll is shattered when she is pushed off the project so the National can cash in on Lennon's popularity by listing him as sole author.
It's a charming, straightforward memoir, one you'd think would be more suited to the page than the stage. There's little action aside from an occasional interjection from William Demeritt as the offstage voice of Adam quizzing his mother on her memories or a series of period pictures projected on a backdrop. But somehow Peter DuBois' production works as theatre. There is an arc of character development as Kennedy's infectious enthusiasm for all things British is followed by her bitter disappointment at being shut out of the creative process on a work she initiated. This metamorphosis is expertly conveyed by Pressley and aided by Walter Trarbach's sound design, which incorporates the music of the swinging '60s.
There is the odd bit of name-dropping ("Oh, look, there's Sean Connery"), but this 68-minute curiosity captures a fascinating phase of a major playwright's life and a unique moment in cultural history.
Presented by and at the Public Theater as part of Public Lab,
425 Lafayette St., NYC.
Feb. 10-23. Tue.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.
(212) 967-7555 or www.publictheater.org.
Casting by Jordan Thaler and Heidi Griffiths.