NEW YORK — Imagine you’re a celebrity writer invited to speak by your alma mater, where you had a mostly miserable time, thanks to the racism of the time and place. Imagine further that the person inviting you asks you to talk about why you have so much violent imagery in your creative work.
So you decide to tell him why. In a play that Ohio State’s public relations department likely will not see as an asset for the university.
Audra McDonald looks like the star of the new Broadway show at the James Earl Jones Theatre in New York but, by design, everything in director Kenny Leon’s production, which opened last week, is designed to focus on the playwright: Adrienne Kennedy, a 91-year-old Black playwright who, back in 1992, told it like it was in “Ohio State Murders.”
