Murder in the Academy

The Ohio State Murders, one of the most famous works by acclaimed playwright and Harvard visiting professor Adrienne Kennedy, is ostensibly a play about violence. "I was asked to talk about the bloody imagery in my work," says Denise Nicholas at the start of the performance, playing a famous writer returning to give a lecture at her alma mater. "Bloodied heads, severed limbs, dead father, dead Nazis, dying Jesus." But those audience members looking for a shocking array of violence and defacement, a visual testament to the horrors of American racism which the play so brilliantly confronts, will have to look elsewhere. Yes, there is violence in The Ohio State Murders: gunshots which break across the dialogue, descriptions of a kidnapping, images of infanticide. But the shock value of these sounds and words and images comes not from the violence they represent but from the way that violence is kept at the periphery of the play. Indeed, the horror of the central murders in The Ohio State Murders is so subtly presented it could almost be forgotten. But the horror of the world surrounding those murders is so pervasive that it cannot help but disturb.

As written, The Ohio State Murders, the second play in a cycle of four works concerning the fictional writer Suzanne Alexander, consists of a lecture Alexander rehearses in the library stacks of her old university. For the current American Repertory Theatre production, however, director Marcus Stern has reset the play during the actual delivery of Alexander's lecture concerning the kidnapping and murder of her two infant daughters. Instead of the private recollections of a horribly wronged mother, we hear the carefully controlled rage of a public speaker. Instead of the mountainous stacks of books called for in Kennedy's script, we see a nearly empty classroom (brilliantly conceived by set designer Molly Hughes in a cream white just this side of what we might expect the walls of an interrogation room to be painted).

These changes have their drawbacks. Gone is the brilliant juxtaposition of public speech and private thought that makes the original script so intriguing. Gone is the overwhelming presence of words in the play-a lecture practiced in a library, cascades of written and spoken letters all desperately trying to make sense of a violence too heinous for language. But what takes the place of these lost elements is equally intriguing. The Ohio State Murders in its current production is a lyric exploration of emptiness, an absolutely breathtaking amalgam of hauntingly lonely lighting, pale-colored costumes and a score that's downright chilling in its simple beauty. (Kudos to John Ambrosone, Viola Mackenthun and Christopher Walker for their respective designs.) Underneath the surface, however, this enrapturing meditation on emptiness is really a study of absence. Forced absence. The only books on stage lie on the desk of Professor Robert Hampshire, Suzanne's teacher and lover at Ohio State. In scenes that should be crowded-a classroom, a movie screening-the only characters on stage are those directly mentioned in Alexanders' lecture. And in place of the constant snowfall called for in Kennedy's script there is only Molly Hughes' wonderfully stark, starless night sky.

The world of The Ohio State Murders has become, in essence, a literalization of the world of racism in which African-Americans were forced to live in the 1950s. A college campus that was no doubt bustling and exciting for its white students is but a series of near-empty classrooms for its socially estranged black students, played with a heart-breaking mix of innocence, enthusiasm and indignation by Malinda Walford and Kibi Anderson. Moreover, a world of teachers dispensing knowledge and guidance has been reduced to a single white professor who is more interested in keeping knowledge from his black students than sharing it with them. The characters in Kennedy's play-intelligent and capable African-Americans trying to climb a ladder towards success specifically designed to keep them down-live in a world apart. A stark, empty, isolated world.

And the true violence of The Ohio State Murders lies in this world of absence. The violence of sexual exploitation, kidnapping and murder are all forms of horror easily understood and condemned, even if they are impossible to describe in terms that do justice to the pain they can create. Gunshots can shock us for a moment, images of murdered babies can make us cringe or weep. But they are sounds and sights to which we know how to react; we have categories of thought and emotion into which we can place our surprise or anger. We can hear and appreciate the rage turned to disbelieving reflection in Denise Nicholas' mature, measured voice, and we can sympathize with her loss.

But the violence we dont know how to confront is the violence of exclusion-the violence of a system that forbids its brightest students from studying what they love, that purposefully works its most promising talents to the point of exhaustion and despair. It is a subtle, unspoken, cold kind of violence, all the more disturbing for its complete lack of passion. It is a violence so ethereal that it is almost impossible to name, though a play like The Ohio State Murders makes it impossible to ignore. Ultimately, Stern and Kennedy were right to draw this most troubling layer of human cruelty out of an already troubling script-and to draw it out with such beautiful, stark imagery that we cannot help but watch in horrified awe. Although it is Alexander's children who are murdered in Kennedy's play, it is Alexander herself that the American educational system tries to kill though an unnameable suffocation. And lest we think America has moved beyond such quietly murderous systems of racism, at least in its highest and most enlightened institutions, Stern places prominently in the very center of the set a clock that tells the correct time as the performance progresses. The real violence in Kennedy's play is as present now as it was in the 1950s of the play's narrative. It is still as present and as unrecognized.

THE OHIO STATE MURDERS

written by

Adrienne Kennedy

directed by

Marcus Stern

Through April 16

American Repertory Theatre

Hasty Pudding Theater

written by

Adrienne Kennedy

directed by

Marcus Stern

Through April 16

American Repertory Theatre

Hasty Pudding Theater