Aftershock

Ryan McKittrick: What prompted you to write The Ohio State Murders?

Adrienne Kennedy: I’d always wanted to write about Ohio State. And I knew it had to be fictionalized. But I could never think of what the plot would be. Then I was teaching at Stanford during the 1989 earthquake. That was the closest I’d ever come to death. I was sitting at my desk when the earthquake started. I got confused and mistakenly ran into the closet. I recovered from the earthquake, but I couldn’t recover from the aftershocks. The police put yellow tape and a sign that read “Do Not Enter” in my yard. And I had to go live in another house for two weeks because of the damage. After the earthquake, I suddenly began to remember Ohio State. And this play started to pour out of me. I finished it in six weeks.

RM: So that dangerous, destructive environment reminded you of Ohio State?

AK: I’m sure you’re right. But I’ve never tried to define my states of mind when I write. I was just in a state of fear and agitation after the earthquake.

RM: “College” is one of the shortest chapters in your autobiography, People Who Led to My Plays. What kept you from writing in more depth about Ohio State for so long?

AK: I couldn’t. I felt that the white world at Ohio State was against me. Totally. And the person who saved me was my husband to be.

RM: In the early sixties, your trip to Europe and Africa inspired you to complete your first play, Funnyhouse of a Negro. Landscape and a sense of place has a great impact on the narrator in The Ohio State Murders. Is geography something that inspired you to write this play?

AK: Very much so. I get excited by landscape. I feel enclosed by it. I feel it is speaking to me. Ohio State was dark. It had those dark buildings. The main part of campus was built around 1890. And it had all these paths that were so intriguing to me. It had a lake and a river and a ravine. And it was quite thrilling to me.

RM: Thrilling in a terrifying way?

AK: Yes. Exactly. But you see, I don’t want to mix the play up with my own experiences. Adrienne the person went to Ohio State, barely made it through, got engaged, got married, and went to parties. The play is much darker. But it’s how I felt. There were 27,000 whites at Ohio State and maybe about 300 blacks. And I felt that Ohio State hated me and was trying to destroy me.

RM: How were you able to develop there as a writer?

AK: I didn’t develop there as a writer. Oh, no. All my friends and I majored in elementary education. I was going to be an elementary school teacher, exactly like my mother. After college, I moved to New York with my husband. He was a grad student getting his PhD at Columbia, and I had a baby. And I would stay up all night long and write. I had circles under my eyes. People laughed at me–I’m still kind of bitter about that. People thought it was funny that this little housewife, the wife of a successful student, wanted to be a writer. People would say, “Can you come to the park with us?” And I’d say, “No, I can’t come to the park; I’m working on my novel.” For ten years I tried writing novels, short stories, scenes. I owe everything to my former husband. He never laughed at me and he read every word I wrote. Sometimes he really worried about me because I would cry when my novels were rejected. It took me several weeks to get out of that mood after my work was rejected. But my husband supported me. And those ten years were the years I developed as a writer.

RM: A number of your plays, including The Ohio State Murders, have a narrator, which traditionally is a device of the novel. What do you find dramatically appealing about a narrator?

AK: In all the pieces I was trying to write in my twenties, I didn’t have a narrator; and there was something wrong with them. When I saw Martha Graham’s troupe perform Clytaemnestra in my mid-twenties, I liked the idea that there was one person saying all these things. It led me to read the Greek plays, particularly Antigone and Electra. I was very drawn to the Greek heroines, and that’s really what I was trying to imitate. I was trying to make Suzanne Alexander [the narrator of The Ohio State Murders] like Antigone or Electra. Lorca’s Poet in New York, which I must have read in 1955, also inspired me to write characters who narrate their inner worlds. I think I’ve spent my whole life trying to write Poet in New York.

RM: Besides the narrator, what attracts you to that collection of poetry?

AK: The turbulence of the imagery. And the landscape of Manhattan.

RM: Many of your narrators experience intense identification with fictional characters or movie stars. Do you also identify with fictional characters?

AK: Very much so. I just feel so close to fictional people. I’ve always been like that. When I read Jane Eyre, she was more real to me that whole winter than, say, my own family. As a kid, for the whole summer I might be Bette Davis. My mother took me to the movies every weekend; and I could tell she liked the movies a lot. And the movies took on an import. They always made her very moody and tearful. So I’d pay closer attention. She’d come home, smoke a cigarette and look very sad for a couple hours. Then she might tell me a story–she’s a great storyteller. Most of my heroines have the same tone as my mother. I was just transfixed by her storytelling about her early life. Just as I’ve spent so much of my life trying to write Poet in New York, I also think that I’ve spent my whole life trying to recapture the drama with which my mother told her stories. My father also influenced me. He was a social worker who always spoke at banquets. At those banquets with jello salads, my father would get up and give a speech about the cause of the American Negro.

RM: Suzanne Alexander, the narrator in The Ohio State Murders, references the end of her story at the beginning of the play. Why?

AK: I value suspense greatly. I love Hitchcock. I’m also always trying to write Vertigo. I saw his movies when I was an adolescent. Strangers on a Train. Spellbound. Shadow of a Doubt.

RM: So you provide glimpses of the end to heighten the suspense?

AK: Yes. I’m trying to do that.

RM: Suzanne Alexander, like other characters in your plays, repeats herself throughout her story. From where does your appreciation for repetition come, and why do you use it in your plays?

AK: I studied Latin for four years in high school. My Latin teacher was my greatest teacher. She used to read us the same passages about Julius Caesar over and over again. I couldn’t always read the Latin words, but when she read it, I knew what she was saying. My mother also told the same stories over and over again. And I think I realized the hypnotic value of that. She might say, “My stepfather was killed crossing a railroad track.” And then the next time she might say, “My stepfather stepped on a live wire.” She would always vary it a little. I also think I’ve been trying to imitate Negro spirituals in my plays. I love the repetition in Negro spirituals. And the emotional language. When I would go to church as a child with my father, I would notice people around me were crying. One of my favorite spirituals was, “Mary don’t you weep, don’t you weep, don’t you weep, don’t you weep.” I really understand now, that all these things take hold of you when you’re terribly young.

RM: How do you greet the production of The Ohio State Murders at the American Repertory Theater?

AK: When I see my plays, I’m sort of upset. I’m not a really good judge of them on stage. I get upset because I still can’t believe that I have all these things just boiling inside of me. I don’t see my plays more than once or twice when they’re produced; and I seldom ever re-read them. Something about it is disturbing. But I’m excited about Ohio State being produced at the A.R.T. because I love the theater and I admire Bob Brustein a lot. The fact that I’ve seen the play produced on three previous occasions might allow me to enjoy this production. Hopefully. I don’t get many productions of my plays. People tend to teach them, but they rarely produce them.

RM: You’ve taught playwriting at many colleges and universities, including Harvard. Which of your own approaches to playwriting do you pass on to your students?

AK: I rely heavily on my dreams, so I encourage students to keep track of their dream images. I always try to be aware of what I’m dreaming, and I steal from those images. My play, A Rat’s Mass, for example, was based on this recurrent dream that I was being chased by bloodied rats. I also encourage students to write things that are of importance. Very often we writers, all writers, tend to write about things that are trivial. So I try to get people to write about something important that happened to them.

Ryan McKittrick is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training.