“I was asked to talk about the violent imagery in my work: bloodied heads, severed limbs, dead father, dead Nazis, dying Jesus. The chairman said, we do want to hear about your brief years here at Ohio State, but we also want you to talk about the violent imagery in your stories and plays.”
These lines are delivered by Suzanne Alexander, a not-so-thinly-veiled avatar of the playwright and Ohio State alumna Adrienne Kennedy (BS '53, DRH '03) in the opening pages of her play, "Ohio State Murders" (1992). Nearly six decades after her first of more-than-20 plays debuted, a new production of "Ohio State Murders" at the newly-renamed James Earl Jones Theatre marks the first time that the 91-year-old Kennedy has seen one of her scripts performed on Broadway.
Except, as she told The New York Times in a recent interview, she’s not sure if she will be able travel from Williamsburg, Virginia, where she lives with her son, to see the production. Kennedy has previously lamented that her plays are more-often studied than produced, in large part due to the always visceral, sometimes Absurdist and frequently violent imagery and staging she uses to tackle the indignities of racism and misogyny.
Her 1964 theatrical debut, "Funnyhouse of a Negro," was produced by legendary playwright Edward Albee, but it met harsh criticism from some who viewed it as "anti-white" and "too political" and others who viewed it as "anti-Black" and "not supporting the movement." Kennedy says she does not expect, at this point, the recognition that she has long been denied. That, in her 10th decade of life, it may be too late for that.
But Kennedy is present in every line spoken by Suzanne Alexander, who is portrayed in Kenny Leon’s production by six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald. "I knew that Suzanne Alexander is a semi-autobiographical character," McDonald said on a recent interview on NPR’s "Here & Now." "I knew that I could study all of the plays, I could read all of the articles written about her, but I thought, let’s go to the Oracle, let’s go straight to the source, here."
As ever, Kennedy was eager to teach — here, to tell McDonald about the personal tribulations that informed Suzanne’s experience at Ohio State in the early 1950s.
“I spoke to [Adrienne] a while ago, Suzanne is speaking about this horrible thing that happened to her because of racism," McDonald said, "but it’s also the death by 1,000 cuts of systemic racism that just slices and dices a person and their psyche and their experience and their livelihood and their thrivability. And she said, ‘Yes yes yes!”
The campus that Suzanne describes in "Ohio State Murders" is largely familiar, even when viewed through a grotesque lens. The opening stage directions refer to University Hall. Suzanne speaks about the Oval, the Olentangy River, Mirror Lake, the Union, High Street, “the lawn behind the dorm where the white girls sunned.” And, in the same measured way, a ravine where “a year-and-a-half later, one of my baby twin daughters would be found dead.”
The indignities that Suzanne suffers are described in restrained tones. The sorority girls that accused her of stealing jewelry. The white medical center intern who wouldn’t touch her when she sought help for her bleeding scalp. The white professor who accused her of plagiarizing an English essay about "Tess of the d’Ubervilles": “It was inconceivable to him that this tiny [Black] girl in a pink sweater could write.” The disgrace foisted upon Suzanne when an affair leads to her pregnancy and temporary ouster from the university. The kidnap and titular murder of Suzanne’s twin daughters.
(It should be noted that the murders at the center of "Ohio State Murders" are not strictly autobiographical. The violence of Kennedy’s work is often a metaphor for the violence perpetuated against the psyche or the spirit – here, representing the death of Kennedy’s own innocence and the destruction of her dream to pursue an English Literature degree.)
Even in the frame narrative of "Ohio State Murders" — that Suzanne is preparing to return to her alma mater to lecture about her work — Kennedy situates the audience in the role of her students, participants in her lecture and witnesses to the forensically delivered facts of a double murder.
“Of course, it’s like a murder mystery, but it’s an indictment, it’s a cautionary tale, it’s a calling-out,” says McDonald. “And she presents it, you know, in just the most intellectual way that she possibly can, because that’s the only way she can get through it. Then, when she explains, ‘and this is why there’s violence in my work,’ she’s telling you that this is the only place that she’s been able to release it.”
"Ohio State Murders" holds up a difficult-to-view mirror for higher education, in general, and The Ohio State University, in particular – both past and present. “She’s very aware that the truth, which was buried, is going to be cataclysmic, it’s going to be an indictment on this institution, by her telling the truth," McDonald said of Suzanne's monologues. "But it’s necessary." Necessary because the injustices that Suzanne Alexander faces in 1950s Columbus are not relegated to history but reflect the struggles that Black Americans — particularly Black women — face today, especially in an academic environment.
The reactions of audiences on Broadway tell the tale. “I know when there’s Black women in the audience because I’ll hear certain reactions to certain things that Suzanne says that hit home,” says McDonald. “So, I’ll hear reactions. And I think it’s completely involuntary.”
The import of Kennedy’s work becomes clearer and clearer as years pass. Reviewing a 2007 Off Broadway production of "Ohio State Murders" for The New York Times, the critic Charles Isherwood wrote that Kennedy “is surely one of the finest living American playwrights and perhaps the most underappreciated.” Her works are discussed in the same conversations as those of Zora Neale Hurston. Kennedy has since instructed playwriting students at Berkley, Harvard, Stanford and Yale.
As ever, Kennedy and her works are here to teach. We, in turn, must be prepared to listen.
"Ohio State Murders" runs at the James Earl Jones Theatre through Jan. 15. It is directed by Kenny Leon and stars Audra McDonald, Bryce Pinkham, Mister Fitzgerald, Lizan Mitchell and Abigail Stephenson.