Some playwrights aren’t made for Broadway—which is not a knock on their work, obviously. Adrienne Kennedy has won awards and acclaim for her stage work over the past half-century, but it wasn’t until Audra McDonald advocated for her that Kennedy has finally made her belated Broadway debut with Ohio State Murders, which premiered in 1992 at the Great Lakes Festival in Ohio with Ruby Dee in the lead; its Off-Broadway premiere, starring LisaGay Hamilton, was in 2007. 

 

The story, about Suzanne Alexander, a Black author who returns to her alma mater, Ohio State, decades after a couple of tragic deaths occurred, is told mainly through a speech she gives at the university that begins “I was asked to talk about the violent imagery in my work.” She then describes her student life on campus—just a few years after the OSU dorms were desegregated—where she meets David, whom she will later marry, and Robert Hampshire, an English professor, who will figure heavily in her tale. (Robert—played by a jumpy Bryce Pinkham—makes periodic appearances throughout the 75-minute play.)

 

To give away more would ruin the play’s lone narrative surprise, but then again Kennedy is not interested in mere plot twists. Her dense, clinical language for Suzanne keeps the audience at arm’s length even as we sense where her monologue is heading. After she describes the title crimes and how and why they occurred, she ends by returning to her opening: “And that is the main source of violent imagery in my work. Thank you.”

 

Despite subtly dealing with the effects of systematic racism, it all seems like a grotesque shaggy-dog story. Kenny Leon directs sympathetically, Beowulf Boritt’s set is jaggedly symbolic, and Allen Lee Hughes’ astute lighting accents the dark places of memory. But, although McDonald gives an intense, focused performance as Suzanne, she is unable to unlock anything deeper than numbness.