“That’s our general practice,” a college dormitory headmistress crisply replies when she’s accused of routinely examining Black students’ personal belongings. It’s one of many instances of casual, Eisenhower-era racism that energize Ohio State Murders, a 1992 work marking the Broadway debut, at age 91, of much-lauded veteran playwright Adrienne Kennedy. A splendid piece of craftsmanship in its own right, the play is further served by a scintillating turn from another theatrical treasure, six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald.
It’s a piece of direct address within a realistic context. In the 1990’s, distinguished playwright Suzanne Alexander (McDonald) has been invited back to Columbus to lecture on her work, particularly to identify the source of so much violent imagery in her plays. Her Ohio State experiences in 1949-1951? Not so much of that, Ms. Alexander, if you please. But there are reasons her studies didn’t go as hoped, reasons she is haunted still, reasons impossible to detach from the career that followed.
To get to the bottom of why this compact piece (75 minutes) hits so hard, it’s necessary to examine the Kennedy aesthetic, which ought to be better known anyway. It might be deemed “autobiographical-ish”: a free mix of genuine memories of 91 years as writer and teacher, and pure fiction. Whether concocting one of her scabrous, surrealistic fantasias of Black life (like her landmark, 1964 Obie-winning Funnyhouse of a Negro, or A Rat’s Mass), or sending her theatrical avatar Suzanne down a rabbit hole of memory as she does here (and in three other “Alexander Plays”), Kennedy lays down no signposts as to what’s “true” and what’s not. It’s the cumulative effect that matters.
So it’s not especially relevant that the titular crimes visited on Suzanne in the wake of a campus interracial relationship, and that’s all I’ll say, are not part of the Kennedy bio, whereas the shabby treatment by OSU — including expulsion, and a refusal to let her, as a Black woman, major in English — certainly was. If sorting that all out matters to you, save it for the ride home. For the time we’re sitting in the newly-named James Earl Jones Theatre, we are invited to take the measure of the person speaking to us in whole, as a woman of color whose ill use is both a cautionary tale for her sisters, and an indictment of society at large.
Focus on the principal is easy enough considering the prodigious, one might even say legendary, talent who embodies her. I was about to say “impersonates,” but what McDonald pulls off is richer than any mere impersonation. As the aging guest speaker, she begins gracious and demure, with the flutey voice and ready, fluttery laugh that we know as Kennedy’s because an extensive interview with her has been piped through the sound system as a preshow — a bold choice offering the star a lot to live up to.
As Suzanne’s recollections proceed — roughly chronological, but sometimes jagged or mysterious in Kennedy’s characteristic collage fashion — McDonald shape-shifts into the undergraduate she was and back again, each new revelation mining deeper sources of pain and humiliation. The first syllable of the author’s first name is pronounced to rhyme with “mad,” and rightly so: She (Suzanne/Adrienne) is one angry writer, and the passage of time has done nothing to resolve a lifetime’s worth of abuse, insult and betrayal stemming from skin color and gender.
What McDonald pulls off so magically is bringing up all this emotion in dribs and drabs, at first reluctantly, then more and more forthrightly as if wrenched out into the air beyond her control. Suzanne has never said her full story aloud before now, she tells us, and McDonald indeed achieves what actors and critics prize as “the illusion of the first time.” She learns more about herself while we do, and progressively gets torn apart all over again. The audience gasps and tears that accompany the performance are honestly earned and, I expect, unforgettable.
A Zoom reading of the play during the pandemic immersed McDonald in the material, and director Kenny Leon has planted her amidst a first-rate physical production. Beowulf Boritt’s set incorporates reality and fancy much as Kennedy does. Suzanne is surrounded by law library volumes, for instance, but the shelves are overhead and askew like cards thrown into the air in Alice in Wonderland. It’s a snowy day in Columbus, but we see the constant flakes through a gaping gash in the black back wall, the shavings of a consciousness being deconstructed before our eyes. Allen Lee Hughes’ lighting subtly ushers us through mists of pain and memory, with Jeff Sugg’s deftly chosen projections illustrating historical moments.
Four other thesps are brought in to enact brief but key interactions, most notably Bryce Pinkham as the teacher of Thomas Hardy who’s gobsmacked by Suzanne (and Hardy’s Tess has distinct parallels here). But would Ohio State Murders work better as a monologue? I think not. Solo memories are one thing, but recollection alternately bolstered and challenged by witnesses takes on greater heft. In the mind we can easily escape those we’ve hurt or who have hurt us; harder to do when they’re there in the flesh.
I can’t believe that James Earl Jones would be anything but proud of the inaugural attraction in the elegantly-renovated Cort, now bearing his name.
Ohio State Murders opened December 8, 2022, at the James Earl Jones Theatre (formerly Cort) and runs through January 15, 2023. Tickets and information: ohiostatemurdersbroadway.com
