OHIO STATE MURDERS, a play by Adrianne Kennedy
Ohio State Murders is a narrative monologue, told in a rarely changing monotone that builds with understated repressed suspense that requires total focus. Adrienne Kennedy has written it with the full intention that the drama dwells in your mind and imagination, a stylistic intellectual technique that tends to evolve in a static manner and limits or deadens true emotional catharsis.
It is given a full production with good actors, but it is essentially a one-act served up as a total evening’s entertainment, an irritant to a playgoer who forks out $75 a ticket and is on the street again in an hour.
The play utilizes characters who appear around the narrator, supposedly giving visualization and help in the telling of the story, but in actuality these actors essentially have little to do other than to walk around stiffly and say one or two insignificant lines. They could just as well be disposed of, and the storytelling could be offered entirely by the narrator who could sit on a stool or at or on a table.
The essential part of the story takes place in flashbacks to the 1950s. We’ve heard it before – intellectual white male literary professor in racist college takes advantage of black woman student who he deems is a writer of genius and who he eventually sacrifices for his own career and professional position (as well as guilt and shame), while she silently remains the puritanical, gentle, soul-suffering, struggling victim who is expelled from college yet must proceed with life even though destroyed. There are more specifics in the literature-focused story line than that, but the general theme is the inhumanity and violence of whites towards blacks and men towards women.
Why the white man kills the black babies one by one without killing the mother is another element left up to audience imagination. Nor is the white man drawn with a foreshadowing flaw, such as inherent frustration or failure, anger, jealousy, murderous or suicidal nature. Nor do we see one moment of real sexual attraction between man and woman – nor is it described, other than to hear that she goes to his room and in another sentence that she is pregnant. (The college grounds are meticulously described, pointing out invisible separations between black and white students.) We do not see the emotional pathos of a single woman left with baby twins or her struggle to care for or support them. What we see is a new mother entirely composed coming into a room carrying two babies and sitting in a chair. Most young mothers of twins are not so lucky as to be able to composedly sit in chairs for lengths of time. Assuredly, this play is not to be seen realistically, even though the author surely wants us to realistically relate to the theme.
Technically, we cannot make out the pictures of the slides that are thrown onto ceiling-high bookshelves -- no point in them anyway. The falling snow does not tell us much. The realistic set does nothing to enhance the storytelling.
The narrative words are supposedly what count in this play – you can become absorbed and, though the story is not new and does not project solutions, it does remind us of continuing major issues.
It is given a full production with good actors, but it is essentially a one-act served up as a total evening’s entertainment, an irritant to a playgoer who forks out $75 a ticket and is on the street again in an hour.
The play utilizes characters who appear around the narrator, supposedly giving visualization and help in the telling of the story, but in actuality these actors essentially have little to do other than to walk around stiffly and say one or two insignificant lines. They could just as well be disposed of, and the storytelling could be offered entirely by the narrator who could sit on a stool or at or on a table.
The essential part of the story takes place in flashbacks to the 1950s. We’ve heard it before – intellectual white male literary professor in racist college takes advantage of black woman student who he deems is a writer of genius and who he eventually sacrifices for his own career and professional position (as well as guilt and shame), while she silently remains the puritanical, gentle, soul-suffering, struggling victim who is expelled from college yet must proceed with life even though destroyed. There are more specifics in the literature-focused story line than that, but the general theme is the inhumanity and violence of whites towards blacks and men towards women.
Why the white man kills the black babies one by one without killing the mother is another element left up to audience imagination. Nor is the white man drawn with a foreshadowing flaw, such as inherent frustration or failure, anger, jealousy, murderous or suicidal nature. Nor do we see one moment of real sexual attraction between man and woman – nor is it described, other than to hear that she goes to his room and in another sentence that she is pregnant. (The college grounds are meticulously described, pointing out invisible separations between black and white students.) We do not see the emotional pathos of a single woman left with baby twins or her struggle to care for or support them. What we see is a new mother entirely composed coming into a room carrying two babies and sitting in a chair. Most young mothers of twins are not so lucky as to be able to composedly sit in chairs for lengths of time. Assuredly, this play is not to be seen realistically, even though the author surely wants us to realistically relate to the theme.
Technically, we cannot make out the pictures of the slides that are thrown onto ceiling-high bookshelves -- no point in them anyway. The falling snow does not tell us much. The realistic set does nothing to enhance the storytelling.
The narrative words are supposedly what count in this play – you can become absorbed and, though the story is not new and does not project solutions, it does remind us of continuing major issues.
