narration—a series of dreamy dispatches
that never quite settle into dialogue—
shows just how misty this doomed mat-
ter of the heart really is.
The Round House production, di-
rected by Nichole A. Watson, doubles
down on Kennedy’s suspenseful gauzi-
ness. There are quick cuts to highly sym-
bolic representations of the actors’ words—
somebody’s hand opens slowly to reveal,
embedded on the palm, a series of graves—
and the lighting (designed by Sherrice
Mogjani) is a spectral, insistent blue. I
came away thinking that Kennedy’s work
is unusually well suited to filmic treat-
ment: when her characters speak, they
not only advance the plot but impart lush
and unlikely images. A great filmmaker
interested more in rhythm and the un-
canny than in strict narrative—someone
like Garrett Bradley or Kahlil Joseph—
could make a Tarkovskian masterpiece
after soaking in Kennedy’s œuvre.
Still, despite the richness of the im-
agery, I kept thinking about the actors,
who weren’t so much acting as reading
out loud. Every once in a while, they’d
steal a glance at the text, which made
me think of them less as performers
than as partakers in a closet play, try-
ing to bring the show out into the liv-
ing room, where the rest of us could
hear. If the Kennedy of “Funnyhouse”
was trying to find an identity, or a nar-
rative, worth living out, she has, in later
years, begun to acknowledge that some-
body, somewhere, has already staked out
a plan, like it or not. (The stage direc-
tions, read by Agyeiwaa Asante, give
that sense a concrete voice.) Romantic
choice is often a metaphor for the more
drastic currents lurking elsewhere in our
lives, eager to take us under.
That feeling grows stronger in a pair
of plays written in the nineties—“Ohio
State Murders” and “Sleep Deprivation
Chamber”—which feature Kennedy’s
alter ego, Suzanne Alexander. Suzanne,
like Kennedy, is a celebrated playwright
who travels to universities and gives talks
about such topics as “the construction of
a play with Aristotelian elements.” In
“Ohio State Murders,” directed by Val-
erie Curtis-Newton, Suzanne (Lynda
Gravátt) tries to explain the source of the
violent imagery in her plays. Her lec-
ture—confined to the page, a reminder
of a lost feeling of freedom—is, in Ken-
nedy’s hands, a roving monologue, which
acts as a background for a story set in the
past. The young Suzanne (Billie Krish-
awn) is a student at Ohio State Univer-
sity, infatuated with Thomas Hardy’s
“Tess of the d’Urbervilles” and, more prob-
lematically, her white English professor.
Upward mobility, which Negro-Sarah
hoped might earn her a pass from trouble,
has introduced the young Suzanne to the
beginning of an inevitable tragedy.
“Sleep Deprivation Chamber,” which
Kennedy wrote in collaboration with
her son Adam, and is directed here by
Raymond O. Caldwell, tells the story of
Suzanne’s son, Teddy, who was accosted
by police outside his own front door—
an eerie forecast of the incident involv-
ing the Harvard professor Henry Louis
Gates and the Cambridge police, which
was refereed by Barack Obama—and
badly beaten. Absurdly, it’s Teddy (Dei-
moni Brewington) who stands accused
of a crime. Again, Suzanne’s literary ac-
tivity provides a pretext for narration.
Between flashbacks to the assault and
scenes of a deposition, Suzanne writes
letters to public officials who might be
able to help her son.
Suzanne seems to share—if a bit more
jadedly—Negro-Sarah’s ill-fated hope
in Black exceptionalism. In her letters,
Suzanne talks about her brother-in-law,
a Stanford professor emeritus who has
fallen into a race-induced depression,
and her daughter, also a lecturer at Stan-
ford, making sure to mention her own
success. She describes the indignity done
to her son as something that has been
done to “our son and our family.” Ted-
dy’s father, livid, says that the police have
“tangled with the wrong family.” “We
are innocent,” Suzanne says—all of us.
Even though, deep down, she knows that
her family’s well-earned prestige won’t
save Teddy, she can’t help but interpret
the incident as an affront to the entire
edifice of the Black middle class. It was
supposed to help!
Instead, everybody’s following a script.
When, in a flashback, Rex Daugherty,
who plays the police officer, looked down
at his pages, it felt like a revelation, a be-
lated admission that his tough-guy spiel
is, indeed, just a spiel, a play out of some
book, just as his later violence would turn
out to be. Teddy’s cries seem scripted,
too. We all know them, and could even
join in if the occasion ever arose. “Please
let me up,” he says. “I can’t breathe!”