Sophia Walker in Ohio State Murders | Photo by Michael Cooper
I actually read Ohio State Murders—Adrienne Kennedy’s short, stinging play—three times in one sitting; I wanted to make satisfying sense of the heinous acts at the core of the narrative. Described bluntly, they were baffling to me. I figured there were clues, situational specifics, that would enlighten me, provide valuable insight, afford the atrocity some psychological dimension. On the third reading, however, it dawned on me that, despite focused attention, perhaps I wasn’t meant to understand. People do awful things, all the time, and we can’t always access whatever interior mechanism has clicked into place to allow for, well… evil.
Oh, there is an admission, plainly expressed, which we hear third-hand, but it’s abstruse—deliberately so, I suspect. Make no mistake, I have my own evil to reckon with, but this specific crime, and the feeble confession, don’t quite resonate with me. But that doesn’t lesson their impact, especially on our protagonist, Suzanne Alexander—brought to vivid life in this Shaw Festival production by the formidable Sophia Walker.
An equally adept thespian, Philip Akin (honestly, one of our most astute and versatile directors), responding to the fragmented-memory structure of Kennedy’s play, has given us a highly stylized and insightful rendering. The lecture format—bookended perfectly here by an audience exposed under full, anti-theatrical house lights—frames Suzanne’s return to her alma mater as an acclaimed writer. She’s been asked to address the violent imagery in her work. And so she takes us back in time.
Set in the 1990s (when the play was first published and produced), Suzanne reflects upon her time at Ohio State in the late 1940s to early 1950s. Dressed in a smart-looking, pastel, quintessentially chaste skirt-blouse-cardigan ensemble, she drifts between two modes of being: a not quite timid yet certainly delicate youthful enthusiasm and a hardness formed from surviving trauma. Walker establishes each as distinct yet maintains a fluidity that allows us to understand how her personhood has evolved.
She’s one of only a few Black students and faces an array of racist attitudes, both overt and veiled. Although not as conspicuous an outrage as the murders themselves, this oppressive culture is more amorphous and unwieldy, characterized by systemic ills rather than contained individual motives. In this narrative, academia is a representation of America as a whole. When, for instance, her professor, Robert Hampshire (André Morin), asks her if she did, in fact, write her admittedly “brilliant” essay herself, we’re confronted with the pernicious and dehumanizing tendrils of superiority and condescension. Taken one by one, these are annoying, seemingly manageable, but consistently, over years, unaddressed, they take their toll, which Kennedy and Walker make devastatingly clear.
André Morin & Sophia Walker in Ohio State Murders | Photo by Michael Cooper
Morin’s persona is more nebbish than it seemed on the page, which makes his portrayal all the more unnerving. He disarms both Suzanne and us, so his eventual behaviour is all the more disruptive to our sense of equilibrium. Another nuance that didn’t register on the page for me is Walker’s choice to convey Suzanne’s only uncomplicated joy specifically when speaking of her husband David. She is enthusiastic about literature, Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” especially, and her daughters too, but holding David’s framed photo affectionately and displaying it proudly to us, we feel the only untainted peace and comfort of her life.
Melanie McNeill’s symbolic set is a looping track of purple-hued wood with ramps and elevations. The campus pathways that haunt Suzanne are felt in this structure. Embedded within it are a set of books, an abstract representation of the library stacks Suzanne frequents, but it isn’t until you take a closer pre or post-show peak that you recognize they are all copies of “Tess of the d’Urbervilles”—an eerie, disorienting scenic detail that gives us some glimpse at her obsessive fixation and fraught mental state.
The atmosphere of this heavy and heart-rending reverie is completed by the disembodied voices of peripheral figures in Suzanne’s life, woven into the performance by sound designer Jacob Lin, and Jeff Pybus’s textured lighting design, which gives expressive dimension to the set and Alexis Milligan’s movement direction.
The harrowing truth of Suzanne’s history is thrown into striking relief by her brisk, formal introduction and conclusion. She gets caught up in her emotive memory, of course, but ultimately isn’t seeking condolence. She has dutifully shown up to provide context for the violent imagery in her work, as requested, and having done so, abruptly caps her testimony. Kennedy’s structure and Walker’s assured delivery demonstrate the power of direct, unassuming theatrical punctuation.
Ohio State Murders
July 19 to October 3, 2026
Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre
(10 Queen’s Parade, Niagara-on-the-Lake)
50 minutes
André Morin & Sophia Walker in Ohio State Murders | Photos by Michael Cooper