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

Audra McDonald may be the most-awarded Broadway performer of all time, but she’s not done challenging herself. This season she breathes life into Suzanne Alexander, the protagonist of Adrienne Kennedy’s play Ohio State Murders, which opens Thursday, December 8, at the James Earl Jones Theatre. “It’s the hardest role I’ve ever played in my entire life,” the six-time Tony winner tells Vanity Fair. 

McDonald stars alongside Bryce Pinkham, Mister Fitzgerald, Lizan Mitchell, and Abigail Stephenson in the production directed by Tony-winner Kenny 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 play Funnyhouse of a Negro. In an interview with The New York Times, 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.”