Timeline of Story
Adrienne Kennedy adopts a non-linear structure to organize her "Funnyhouse of a Negro". This challenges the audience to pick up little bits of information with seemingly no connection and understand how the pieces fit together in the end. However, I added this page because it can be helpful for cast and production to have a clear idea of the chronology of events in the world of the play. Understanding preceding situations can allow deeper understanding of the characters and their interactions. Hope this helps! :)
In a dark kerosene lamp lit room, Wally's Mother (Sarah's grandmother) wants Wally (Sarah's father) tells him to be like Jesus and "save the race" in Africa. She kills a hen for him to eat, symbolizing her own sacrifice for her son.
Father's Backstory
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Wally falls in love with a white woman, and they get married. Wally's Mother sends a dead chicken to their wedding because she doesn't approve and wants him to go to Africa.
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Wally's mother dies while working (ambiguous when this happens).
Failing Marriage
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The couple first live in New York, but then move to Africa. Wally becomes a missionary teacher dedicating his life ot the erection of a Christian mission in a jungle in a freed country in Africa. Gets mixed up in politics.
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Sarah's mother falls out of love with Sarah's father because she doesn't want him to "save the black race". She spends all her days combing her hair and starts to lose her hair. Sarah's mother refuses intimacy and blames Sarah's father for being black.
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Wally (Father) starts to drink a lot and one day rapes his wife (Mother). Sarah is born from their union that night.
Family Sarah Grew Up In
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Young Sarah blames her father ("nailing him on the cross") for his blackness and idolizes her mother's beauty although her mother is neglectful toward her.
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Sarah's mother loses her hair until she is bald, so the family moves back to New York and Sarah's mother goes to an asylum (implied that her mother dies in the asylum).
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Father had hallucinations, which he told to Sarah, and he tried to hang himself in a Harlem Hotel.
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Sarah's Father goes back to Africa (implied but not stated).
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Sarah graduates from a city college, occasionally works in a library, and writes poetry
1.
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Father's Visits
Father writes to Sarah from Africa asking for forgiveness and for her to join him in saving the race
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2.
Father comes to the corridor of the apartment to beg her for forgiveness.
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3.
Easter morning, Sarah goes to Harlem to worried for her father but he wasn't there and was drunk in the corridor of her apartment instead. When he asked for forgiveness, she left him there.
Death and Guilt
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Patrice Lumumba dies. Sarah thinks her refusing to forgive her Father kept him in New York and that her Father's absence from Africa caused Patrice Lumumba to be murdered. She believes that Jesus killed Patrice Lumumba in the name of God out of anger about Sarah's Father's blackness.
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Father hangs himself in a Harlem Hotel (Sarah believes she "bludgeoned" her father with an ebony mask in the Harlem Hotel. She believes she killed Patrice Lumumba and that made her Father kill himself; she believes she indirectly killed her Father.
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Sarah hallucinates hearing her Father coming back from the dead and knocking on her door (where the play starts).
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Sarah's hair keeps falling out and she and makes sense of her thoughts through her different selves.
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Sarah hangs herself in her apartment.
Was Any of It Real?
Landlady and Raymond find her body. Raymond reveals that her father didn't hang himself but he is a doctor living a very "white" life, the kind of life Sarah always wanted. We are left with ambiguity on how much of the play was true and how much was Sarah's hallucination.