murder she wrote

Before the play begins, we hear an interview of Kennedy billowing throughout the newly named James Earl Jones Theater, hauntingly so. A voice of the present and the past. She chats casually about her work and her career.

We know it’s a play about a murder. The name Ohio State Murders gives it away. But knowing the playwright you know it won’t quite be a whodunit nor quite a mystery. We are in Adrienne Kennedy’s Ohio and already she has us by the buckeyes.

But once the house lights dim, the show belongs to Audra McDonald in her dual role as present day and past day Suzanne Alexander—this is the first time the role has been acted out in this way by one person instead of two. Suzanne is here to give a speech at the university she attended 60+ years ago. The main question that the university wants answered is why her work contains so much violence. So the rest of the play weaves us between the past and the present—sometimes she is telling us a story, and sometimes she is acting it out, so we can better understand the writer who stands before us. One who is both masterful and heartbroken. Measured, calculated, and cold.

The set design is a defiant ode to dadaism with bookshelves strewn about rising and falling from the stage at broken angles, one bookshelf doubles as a podium for the plays’ speeches— and the constant movement, the emotional heartbeat which shows through a crack in the stages’ abyss and throughout the entire production that crack is filled with everchanging falling snow.

Audra McDonald gets her full set of flowers for taking on the role of two. But this just one of the many doubles. The two babies, the two other actors playing two people each, the two suitors, the two time periods.

I’m enamored by Kennedy. She is telling us the most horrific story, but the storytelling remains soft, ethereal, and dare I say enchanting. I’m thinking ok whether coincidentally or on purpose Kennedy is speaking to the establishment, whether that be academia or Broadway or any predominantly White institution and she is giving them the same middle finger that her professor, Robert Hampshire deserves. He deserves far more than that of course as much like the relationship she’s had with this industry he’s distasteful.

What happened at Ohio State is just one of many encounters I’m sure she’s had when trying to “test into the major” of Broadway or Harvard. The undeniable duality of wanting to destroy a system that you simultaneously want to be celebrated by.

For this many years, they’ve buried the truth of the murders, to the point where the institution itself doesn’t even realize who they’ve invited to speak. She is not one of their daughters—she’s an orphan, a step child.

The dreams of orphaned children often go unrealized. If you don’t fit the traditional mold you may become too far ahead of the establishment for them to see you in the horizon. Or they catch you just as the sun is setting.

So I know folks are hype the Ohio State Murders made it to Broadway, and we celebrate even as we mourn the murders of so many creative babies that Broadway has left head-cracked in a ravine.