Sleep Deprivation Chamber
by Adam P Kennedy, Adrienne Kennedy

Name: Sleep Deprivation Chamber
Brand: Adam P Kennedy
SKU: 9781559361262
Rating: 3.66 (73 reviews)

Sleep Deprivation Chamber Book Cover — Sleep Deprivation Chamber Cover

Highlights

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90 minsAmerican

What readers are saying

Readers appreciate the timely and poignant nature of "Sleep Deprivation Chamber," noting its exploration of police brutality and state violence through a unique narrative that intertwines with Shakespeare's Hamlet. The play is praised for its fusion of memory and its powerful emotional impact, though some find the structure and dream sequences a bit confusing or lacking context.

Timely and poignant themesStrong emotional impactCreative narrative structureConfusing dream sequences

Synopsis

Winner of the 1996 OBIE Award for Best Play

A gripping examination of the conflicting realities of the Black experience of twentieth-century America.

A broken taillight leads to the brutal beating of a highly educated, middle-class black man by a policeman in suburban Virginia.

The Kennedys interweave the trial of the victimized son (subsequently accused of assaulting the offending officer) with his mother's poignant letters of defense and remembrance.

The Kennedys have created a gripping examination of the conflicting realities of the Black experience in twentieth-century America.

Press Reviews

"In SLEEP DEPRIVATION CHAMBER, which Ms. Kennedy wrote with her son, Adam, the location of what the author once called the 'funnyhouse of a Negro' has shifted from a haunted interior landscape to a world that is crushingly real…This is the stuff of nightmares from which a person can never wake up completely."
— The New York Times