Girl interrupted

Adrienne Kennedy's surreal remembrance

by Carolyn Clay

THE OHIO STATE MURDERS, By Adrienne Kennedy. Directed by Marcus Stern. Set design by Molly Hughes. Costumes by Viola Mackenthun. Lighting by John Ambrosone. Sound by Christopher Walker. With Denise Nicholas, Malinda Walford, John Douglas Thompson, William Church, Kibi Anderson, and Lou Connolly Coleman. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre New Stages at the Hasty Pudding Theatre through April 16.

The Ohio State Murders is stretched taut across a Harvard University stage. Adrienne Kennedy's one-act mystery is a memory play of things that didn't happen, and of things that did, to a young woman going off to college in 1949, one of 300 African-Americans on a campus of 27,000. An exorcism in the guise of a lecture, the lyrical, fragmentary work translates fear, ostracism, and emotional violence into a murder plot and the specter of the university, with its beckoning knowledge and racist betrayal, into a paleface professor with a passion for literature and a heart of darkness. As put forward by director Marcus Stern in a swath of subtle agitation, the play is brief but compelling. And it provides a rare opportunity to experience a work by the much-admired but little-produced Kennedy, who has been a force in American theater since her Funnyhouse of a Negro won an Obie in 1964.

The Ohio State Murders, which was unveiled in 1992, stems from a visit Kennedy made to her alma mater almost 40 years after saying "Goodbye, Columbus." In the theater piece, Kennedy alter ego Suzanne Alexander, an African-American writer of note, returns to the Ohio campus to discuss "violent imagery" in her work: "bloodied heads, severed limbs, dead father, dead Nazis, dying Jesus," as she matter-of-factly rattles them off before launching a tale of trauma that explains why she didn't becoming Lorraine Hansberry.

The work was to have ended the 1995-'96 Signature Theatre season devoted to Kennedy (the New York-based troupe concentrates on a single playwright each year), as part of a larger bill of Suzanne Alexander plays (a suite of four works that feature a character of that name). That production fell through when the lead actress withdrew. The American Repertory Theatre New Stages production manages to hold on to its Suzanne Alexander, film and television actress and writer Denise Nicholas (of the small-screen In the Heat of the Night), who, standing at a podium stage right, spins a cocoon of unrufflement around the play's disturbing events, which are caught like snapshots on the severely raked stage behind her. The one-hour work does make for a somewhat skimpy evening. But like the upcoming ART transfer of the Súgán Theatre Company production of Conor McPherson's St. Nicholas, it's a testament to the potency of storytelling. And like St. Nicholas, it employs a narrative that's lurid on the surface to tell a darker, subtler tale.

Kennedy's influences include giants of literature, popular arts, and African culture; Thomas Hardy, Alfred Hitchcock, and African Nationalist writer and philosopher Frantz Fanon all figure in The Ohio State Murders, along with actual events from the playwright's life. In her talk, the present-day Alexander tells of coming to a barely desegregated Ohio State, as Kennedy did, and being barred from majoring in English. She describes in detail the "geography" of the university, which "made me anxious." In fact, various aspects of campus life both compelled and repelled her, as is evinced in the jumpy flashbacks by the fear and fascination of her younger self (Malinda Walford), a shy young woman seduced by a young instructor's urbane, emotional readings from Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Le Morte Darthur. In Alexander's tale, her expulsion from school is followed by the mysterious murder of one of her twin daughters (who were born out of wedlock). Whereupon the exclusion and discomfort she had experienced in a white-dominated dormitory (she was so tense that she wound her curlers until her scalp bled) explode into full-blown fantasies of death and persecution that "singed the ends of the mind." In a pre-feminist nod, her rescuer is the tall, silent Fanon look-alike who would become her husband. (Kennedy's ex, Joseph, is Fanon's biographer.)

As written, Kennedy's play evolves in sudden or dreamy flashback as Alexander rehearses her speech in the stacks of an OSU library. Director Stern places it in the context of the lecture itself, with us as the student audience. I found Stern's production, with its stark stylization and Alice in Wonderland metaphors for entrapment and escape, masterful. The direction is abetted by John Ambrosone's bold, oft-red lighting and Christopher Walker's sound design, which moves from anxious percolation to ethereal sadness, mixing in sirens, gun shots, and such period snippets as "Happy Talk" from that more benign treatment of racism, South Pacific. And always there is Nicholas's Alexander, dignified and even diffident, as she calmly narrates the nightmare that would turn her into a writer -- or a zombie. The story of "the ravine murder" followed by those of the title puts a too-pat face on the source of "violent imagery" in Alexander/Kennedy's work. But the real source is there, like bones beneath the skin, and you don't need an X-ray to see it.