“The Hardest Role I’ve Ever Played”: Your First Look at Audra McDonald in Ohio State Murders (2024)

McDonald stars alongside Bryce Pinkham,Mister Fitzgerald, Lizan Mitchell, andAbigail Stephenson in the production directed by Tony-winnerKenny Leon. In 1989, Adrienne Kennedy was commissioned to write a play by her hometown playhouse—the Great Lakes Theater in Cleveland. The resulting work was in part inspired by her experience as an undergraduate at Ohio State University as a Black woman in the 1940s. That play,Ohio State Murders, winds and weaves through the memories of Suzanne Alexander—an avatar for Kennedy—as she returns to her alma mater as a guest lecturer, confronting racism and loss as a dark mystery unravels.

At 91 years old, Kennedy makes her Broadway debut as a playwright with the production, despite a thriving and exciting career, championed by fellow playwrights like Edward Albee and winning an Obie award in 1964 for her playFunnyhouse of a Negro.In an interview with The New YorkTimes, Kennedy succinctly explained why she’s only now making her Broadway debut as a nonagenarian: “It’s because I’m a Black woman.” McDonald feels the weight of Kennedy’s response as the actor tasked with ushering in Kennedy’s long overdue debut on the too-aptly nicknamed“The Great White Way.”

“I feel a huge responsibility to make sure that I am telling the story to the best of my ability,” McDonald says. “And especially for [Adrienne Kennedy], since this is her Broadway debut, to make sure that we're infusing it with as much of the truth and capturing the spirit of Suzanne Alexander, the character, but at the same time, I'm wanting to capture the spirit of who Adrienne Kennedy is as well.”

Aside from the pressure to do Kennedy justice, the sheer amount of work the play required also daunted McDonald. “It's a memory play that's basically about 30 lines short of being a complete solo monologue,” she shares. “There are other characters that play and they have a few lines, but it's basically all Suzanne.” She’s taken on predominantly one-woman shows before, perhaps most memorably when she played jazz icon Billie Holiday inLady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,which won McDonald her historic sixth Tony award. But as Holiday,McDonald had the benefit of a bevy of jazz standards to sing. Singing, of course, is something of a super power for McDonald, a Juilliard-trained soprano who recently sold out Carnegie Hall and is set to return on December 19.

But in Ohio State Murders, it’s simply McDonald and Kennedy’s prose. “It's told in a very nonlinear way, so the story is not told chronologically,” McDonald says. “And so the transitions are very difficult. The subject matter is very difficult and very dark and disturbing and painful. And so it's a huge challenge, but it's very fulfilling.”

The idea to bring Kennedy’s work to Broadway began during the height of the pandemic in 2020, when McDonald participated in an online reading ofOhio State Murders. It was the first time McDonald had ever read the play, and it affected her deeply. “I could not shake it after I finished,” she says. “I turned off the computer, and I couldn't shake it. It was still so deeply in my bones and my spirit.” Two days later, a producer from the reading called McDonald and suggested that she do the play on Broadway with Kenny Leon directing. “I jumped at the opportunity, because I was thinking the same thing,” McDonald says. “I mean, not necessarily that it should be me, but that it needs to be brought to Broadway and she deserves her Broadway debut.”

And in an effort to make sure that no deserving Black playwright has to wait 90 years to make a Broadway bow, Ohio State Murders is donating a portion of its proceeds to Black arts and culture organizations, includingNational Black Theatre,Harlem Arts Alliance,Black Theatre Coalition, andThe Classical Theatre of Harlem. “I feel very strongly that we need to give back to Black institutions and to continue raising awareness of diversity needing to be on Broadway and in theatrical and arts institutions across the country,” McDonald says. “If we continue to do that, we won't have to then wait years and years and years and years and years for deserving storytellers, playwrights, performers, creators to have their stories told and their pieces produced and performed.”

But, at least for one deserving storyteller, that long wait has finally come to an end. “I want people to walk out of the theater and those who don't know Adrienne Kennedy's work, I want them to immediately want to read more of her work and learn more about who she is,” McDonald says. I want them to walk out into the world and be made more aware of the different stories out there and have grace to understand what some people have gone through.”

Ohio State Murders opens on Thursday, December 8, at the James Earl Jones Theatre.

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