We begin to see how the routes of opportunity that should be Suzanne’s are instead being closed off. She is a brilliant student, but her brilliance is overlooked by Hampshire and others. Suzanne is denied the chance to be an English major. The two young women are not able to live in the same accommodations as their white sorority sisters, or eat dinner at the same table (those same white sorority sisters laugh and mock and belittle them). In the play, even before the murders happen, we see the racism that Suzanne and best friend Iris Ann (Abigail Stephenson) lived through-it is the bedrock of the violence of all kinds in the play. That abyss is symbolic as well as all too horribly literal the text, at a key moment, defines the word-a concerto of meanings around lack and emptiness, a negative gap into which terrible things are lost and swallowed. We hear scattered words from the other characters, but Suzanne is our narrator and guide through history, setting up scenes within scenes, and moving the action forward via her own narration. Other characters orbit around Suzanne-Lizan Mitchell as Suzanne’s kindly Aunt Louise and two other characters, and Mister Fitzgerald as the lovely lawyer David who comes into Suzanne’s life, and who she will eventually marry, both becoming authors. The production is almost-but-not-quite a monologue. As well as a frozen garland framing the stage, they are embedded in it, forming seats and areas where characters can perch. Beowulf Boritt has constructed a frozen, tumbling cascade of shelved books, speaking to the learning and libraries, the atmosphere of academia-from its stone buildings to its labyrinthine buildings of learning-that first intrigue Suzanne. On stage in front of us is a stunning, meaningful design. But his classroom gentility is a flimsy mask for psychopathic, murderous white arrogance. She mulled Hardy’s old Wessex place names and reveled in the gentle, geeky fervor of her professor Robert Hampshire (Bryce Pinkham), all tweeds and ruffled hair. In 1949-50, she was studying English literature she loved it. Now a famous author, she is there again to talk about her use of violent imagery. Suzanne, now an author, is addressing an audience in the early 1990s about events of 40 years earlier, when in the early 1950s she was one of a small group of Black students at Ohio State University. 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. ‘Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune’: Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon’s Chemistry Burns Up Broadway Our audience sat watching McDonald, a six-time Tony Award winner, in engrossed, outraged, moved silence. Yet her determination to speak is the battering ram through all she has endured. McDonald animates Suzanne’s voice with flickers of upset, fury, the scars and knowledge of harsh injustice, grief, cruelty, and prejudice. We hear the pained grit in her voice, as she digs through layers of tragedy and injustice. Suzanne’s voice quivers with fury alongside a determined strength, as she reveals how her younger self was horribly violated.
McDonald’s truly mesmerizing performance holds so much emotion, so many cadences, and is also a barely suppressed scream. 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.
0 kommentar(er)
