Richard Termine
For the 75-minute duration of Adrienne Kennedy’s stunning play Ohio State Murders (James Earl Jones Theatre, booking to Feb 12, 2023), Suzanne Hamilton’s (Audra McDonald) voice is its own story even as it tells a story. McDonald’s truly mesmerizing performance holds so much emotion, so many cadences, and is also a barely suppressed scream. Suzanne’s voice quivers with fury alongside a determined strength, as she reveals how her younger self was horribly violated.
We hear the pained grit in her voice, as she digs through layers of tragedy and injustice. McDonald animates Suzanne’s voice with flickers of upset, fury, the scars and knowledge of harsh injustice, grief, cruelty, and prejudice. Yet her determination to speak is the battering ram through all she has endured. Our audience sat watching McDonald, a six-time Tony Award winner, in engrossed, outraged, moved silence.
Racism, and its vicious and insidious, all-encompassing practice, is the fulcrum of this shattering play—Kennedy’s “historic and long overdue” Broadway debut at 91, as McDonald says in her Playbill bio—directed with a compact, precise power by Kenny Leon.