‘Ohio State Murders’ at the Shaw Festival is an almost too clinical look at the rot of racism in America

Suzanne Alexander, an accomplished Black writer, is asked to return to her alma mater to deliver a talk about the violent imagery that pervades her work. For nearly an hour, she proceeds to explain that the main source of this imagery stems from a series of murders that shaped her time as a student at Ohio State University, and whose trauma lingers in her stories.

Kennedy’s lecture-within-a-play structure results in a blurring of the fourth wall. We, the audience of “Ohio State Murders,” are also Alexander’s audience. When she speaks, she’s speaking to us.

But despite this proximity, Kennedy’s play is neither warm nor sentimental. Instead, it’s coolly clinical, even austere. And in asking us to bear witness to Suzanne’s story, the play seeks not our empathy, but merely our consideration. Consider the racism embedded in America, it urges. Consider how it appears in both subtle and unsubtle ways. And consider how this violence transforms into trauma. 

As Suzanne, Sophia Walker offers a finely detailed yet similarly unsentimental performance. When she discusses her past, she’s like a forensic detective: calm, poised, almost always sticking to the facts. 

Mundane details are juxtaposed with painful revelations. But Walker’s Suzanne delivers them all in a brusque, matter-of-fact tone. In one early scene, when she’s talking about the layout of her university, describing the residential neighbourhood and steep ravine located just beyond campus, she slips in a bombshell: “One of my baby twin daughters would be found dead there.” Yet as quickly and unexpectedly as she pivots to that subject, she pivots away. “That was later,” she adds, without missing a beat. 

“Ohio State Murders” is, most fundamentally, a memory play. But what Kennedy has done is take a form most associated with playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, and distort and fragment it even further, as if dispersing light through a prism. 

Distinctly postmodern in its style, and written almost entirely as a solo monologue, “Ohio State Murders” is circuitous and squiggly. Time, at least for Suzanne, is non-linear; it can be bent, snipped or erased.

Director Philip Akin embraces this abstractionism. Whereas Kennedy’s play was originally written for a cast of six actors, Akin’s production pares it down to two.

In the show’s many flashback sequences, Walker also plays Suzanne’s younger self. Other characters, such as Suzanne’s friend and aunt, are depicted merely as ghostly voices. (Neil Barclay, Alana Bridgewater, Fiona Byrne, Sharry Flett and Savion Roach make up the recorded cast.) The only character besides Suzanne to appear in the flesh, in fact, is her English professor, Robert Hampshire, played with steeliness by André Morin. (His physical presence later becomes significant.) 

What Akin achieves by eschewing realism so completely is that he lends “Ohio State Murders” an eerie, dreamlike quality, always slippery and elusive. And what becomes clear is that the play, and this production, ultimately serve as a study of trauma and the grief process. 

Occasionally, the clinical, cold nature of Kennedy’s writing feels like it’s taken too far, distancing the audience from Suzanne’s story. In particular, I wish the play offered us more time and additional moments of vulnerability with Walker’s Suzanne. (The taut show runs just 55 minutes.) 

But then again, the play’s severity is what lends it its brutality — one that unmasks the systemic rot that pervades American society. “Ohio State Murders” and Suzanne’s story are by no means easy viewing. Instead of approaching us, the work beckons for us to lean into it.

It’s the ultimate act of bearing witness.