OHIO STATE MURDERS – REVIEW OF 2026 SHAW FESTIVAL PRODUCTION

Reviewed by James Karas

Adrienne Kennedy’s Ohio State Murders is playing at the Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre in Niagara-on-the Lake in an ably acted and very interesting production. Along with its many virtues it does have some less admirable issues. The play has a narrator, Suzanne

Alexander, who talks about her life as a student at Ohio State University in 1949-1950 and in the present as a writer. Sophia Walker plays Suzanne as a young student and a mature writer without any change in costume but with a change in tone when she was young.

The only other character on stage is Robert Hampshire, a young professor of English literature who has a relatively minor but important role compared to Walker. The program lists a recorded cast of Neil Barclay as Dean, Alana Bridgewater as Aunt Lou, Fiona Byrne as Miss Dawson, Sharry Flett as Secretary and Savion Roach as Val. They have brief comments or replies to Suzanne’s narrative. 

Suzanne has a lot tell us and she speaks for most of the 52 minutes that the play lasts without an intermission.

She switches between looking back on her life as a student and speaking as if she were back in 1949. Suzanne is well-dressed, well-spoken and self-assured in telling us her life story. She walks around the stage of the Studio Theatre and faces the audience like an experienced professor facing a class. She tells us about the racism she faced in her youth. Ohio State judged students by their race and black students stayed away from parts of the university and the city.

Sophia Walker and André Morin in Ohio State Murders. 

Photo by Michael Cooper.

Prof. Hampshire who admired her essay on Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles got her pregnant. She had twin girls. He vehemently denied it. She maintains her professional, detached tone and gives few details about important issues.  She mentions almost in passing that she visited “Bobby” in his house twice and a year and a half later one of her daughters was found dead in his neighbourhood. In the same breath she tells us how much she enjoyed discussing Victorian literature with him.

Prof. Hampshire reads some paragraphs from Thomas Hardy along with some turgid criticism and some lines from The Death of Arthur that only English majors should read when trying for a master’s degree.

Suzanne has much to tell but she jumps from past to present and through stories in a disjointed way. She gives specific information about where she walks in the Ohio State campus and jumps back and forth from the crucial story of the murder of her children to less consequential events. The narrative, however well presented, at times sounds  disjointed and crucial information is not provided.

It is a style that Adrienne Kenndy has chosen and it is convenient for maintaining a detached way of a lecture by an alumna many years after her undergraduate days. Memories of racism, unwanted pregnancy and murders are dramatic enough and Sophia Walker delivers it all with superb acting.

One of the reasons Suzanne was invited to speak at her alma mater was to talk about the violent imagery in her work. Bloodied heads, severed limbs, dead father, dead Nazis, dying Jesus. That could be violent imagery but Kennedy does not give us a single example of it. She is asked to talk about her life on campus almost as an afterthought. She talks about the latter in a matter-of-fact way that Kennedy has chosen deliberately no doubt. But there is almost nothing about her violent imagery.

That is my only real complaint about the production and I suppose the play. It is the first play by Adrienne Kenedy that I have seen and kudos go to our local director who is superb in anything he does but I give him extra credit for doing plays by black writers or about blacks.   
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OHO STATE MURDERS  by Adrienne Kennedy will run in repertory until October 3, 2026, at the Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre as part of the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.  www.shawfest.com 

James Karas is the Culture Ediitor of The Greek Press, Toronto