It might be easy to consider that Audra McDonald, who has six Tony Awards to her name, is capable of performances that meticulously sneak yourself in and rock in there as if she’s clearing the bats out of their darkest recesses. A meticulous cartographer of heart and mind, she paints human interiors that were previously unknown or, in the case of “The Ohio Murders,” which opened on Broadway Thursday night, unimaginable before bringing them to life.
This makes the pairing of her celestial celestial and playwright Adrian Kennedy debut on Broadway at age 91 in the first production of the rededicated James Earl Jones Theatre’s christening. Kennedy’s work is a powerful memory collision with the trauma of racial violence that may partly explain the delay. There is a growing claim, at least, that today’s audiences are more apt to look such ugliness in the face than they were in 1991, when the play premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre, or even in 2007, when it was performed Off-Broadway.
But it’s not just the theme of “Ohio State Crimes,” directed here by Kenny Lyon (“Topdog/Underdog”), that requires the kind of intellectual and emotional engagement that distinguishes theater from more passive mediums. Kennedy’s formal style—the intensity of her vocals, the eclecticism with which she chooses to reveal or withhold—a drive of uncertainty, pulls the audience up a slope into a sort of slippery precipice. It is an aesthetic reflection of the narrator’s fraught and unimaginable history.
Distinguished writer Susan Alexander returned in the early 1990s to her alma mater, where she was asked to talk about the violent imagery in her work — “bloodied heads, severed limbs, a dead father, dead Nazis” — that had its origins in the gruesome crimes she suffered some 40 years ago. years, when she was one of the very few black female students there. Her recollections are rich in private details, such as the layout of campus buildings and literary passages she recalls, which he read at length to his first-year lecturer (Bryce Pinkham) from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urberville, about a woman who is raped, punished for her impurity, and ultimately consumed by revenge. Ultimate.
The Ohio Murders isn’t a mystery, nor is it built around suspense conventions — the crimes are in the title, and the revelations about its victims and perpetrators happen almost tangentially. Though these moments are not without a revealing coolness, Kennedy’s brilliance lies in the complexity of her character portrait, in pointing out and illustrating the ways pain and loss imprint upon mind and body. Suzanne’s experiences have shaped how she intersects with the world and expresses herself to the world beyond the isolation of the suffering she has caused. Hence the blood on his head and severed limbs.
“Geography makes me anxious,” says Susan, as if mapping out her relationship to fixed landmarks only reinforces her own sense of homelessness. McDonald is nervous, sometimes shuddering, as she recounts Susan’s time in Ohio, a frailty swaying under the artist’s calmness channeling her survival bent into her work. With long vowels and a surging, almost brooding rhythm, McDonald recounts how Susan used to twist her curlers so tight her scalp would bled, paranoid she felt hearing a white girl’s laughter echo through the halls of her dorm (the haunting sound design by Justin Ellington). MacDonald is equally attentive to all the narrative’s grim details, yet he somehow holds Susan in subtle suspense, a hypnotic tug-of-war between vulnerability and exuberance.
McDonald also has a dual role – playing a present-day, college-age Susan, as previous productions had cast two actors. It’s another way to show how fresh, decades-old wounds, and their lifelong ramifications, can feel while taking full advantage of McDonald’s versatility.
Leone’s production offers a bold, unmistakable visual representation of Kennedy’s argument for literature and fantasy as evidence of, and an essential escape from, human horror. The design for the Beowulf Poiret Collection, a series hanging from bookshelves, sharply lit by Allen Lee Hughes, might be very attractive if it weren’t so stunningly beautiful.
By any apparent measure, Kennedy’s arrival on Broadway in her ninth decade is well overdue. Commercial theater has generally not been the most fertile setting for bold, confrontational action that highlights the voices and experiences of the most marginalized. But when an exception takes root, with a team of artists like these, it’s definitely worth the wait.
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