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SAN FRANCISCO – A funnyhouse at a carnival contains distorted mirrors where the viewer’s reflection is bent in unexpected and eerie ways. 

That’s the image that African American playwright Adrienne Kennedy uses to sum up her difficult and painful Obie Award-winning play “Funnyhouse of a Negro,” revived for a run at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. 

“Funnyhouse of a Negro” was written in 1961, before the civil rights movement and Black pride political activism of the Sixties reached its full momentum. 

First produced off-Broadway by playwright Edward Albee and his partners in 1964, “Funnyhouse of a Negro” is the painful story of a young woman who is filled with conflicting feelings of self-hatred over her mixed race identity. 

Director Margo Hall and her seven actors have created an effective stylized staging of this challenging and unusual non-realistic play. 

In “Funnyhouse,” a young college literature student in New York named Negro Sarah (Moya Furlow) is tormented by her racial identity, as the daughter of a father who is black and of a mother who could pass for white. 

Sarah has created for herself a nightmare and dream world in which real and imagined characters battle in her head over her racial identity. 

Two of the characters are Queen Victoria (Selana Allen) and the Duchess of Hapsburg (Comika Griffin), who represent to Sarah the white European aristocracy to which she aspires as a successful university student of European literature. 

Assassinated African leader Patrice Lumumba (Benton Greene), Sarah’s Jewish boyfriend Raymond (Joel Mullennix) and Jesus Christ (Marcus Conrad Poston) also wander through her imagination and fight for position. 

Finally, Sarah’s landlady and a mother figure (both played by the same actress, Sarah Kliban) ridicule Sarah’s suffering, and further lower her self-esteem. 

These characters in Sarah’s memory and imagination shift in their relationships with each other in odd and sudden ways, as characters and relationships in a dream do. 

Sarah, for example, has the assassination of Lumumba equated with her own father’s hanging death in a New York hotel room, which she at times claims to be responsible for. 

Another part of Sarah believes that her father’s unfulfilled destiny was to return to Africa, become Jesus, and heal his people. 

Paradoxically, Sarah has also come to think of her black father as someone who raped her white mother. 

Many of the unhappy characters in Sarah’s imagination appear to be pulling out patches of hair from their heads in misery. 

Running about an hour, with no intermission, “Funnyhouse” is a dream story about the pain of denying one’s identity. In director Margo Hall’s stylized staging, it appears as though Sarah is undergoing is a nervous breakdown. 

Playwright Kennedy, who is also a poet, has written much of the play’s dialogue as impressionistic, non-realistic solo monologues for Sarah. 

Kennedy was born in Pittsburgh in 1931 to middle class, well-educated parents – a social worker father, and a school teacher mother. Her maternal grandfather was a wealthy, white farmer. Kennedy’s mixed race heritage heavily influenced her writing. 

Director Hall’s staging of this difficult and challenging play is effective, and she gets a strong performance from lead Moya Furlow. 

Sarah’s wail of torture when she can’t stand her conflicted feelings any longer, puts the viewer right inside the mind of someone having a nervous breakdown. This is not a light evening in the theater. 

“Funnyhouse of a Negro” runs Thursday through Sunday, 8 p.m., through June 11 at Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia St. (at 16th Street), San Francisco – a block and a half walk from the 16th Street BART Station. 415-626-3311. 

Thursday performances are pay-what-you-can.