It’s a deeply verbal play-all of its action, including brief visitations by characters who emerge like unfurling smoke from Suzanne’s memory, is spurred forward by her words. The play takes the form of a lecture: Kennedy’s long-standing alter ego, Suzanne Alexander (Audra McDonald), is giving a guest speech at Ohio State University, about the roots of “the violent imagery in my work bloodied heads, severed limbs, dead father, dead Nazis, dying Jesus.” That premise, for what might have been a fairly dry talk, becomes a long, increasingly unthinkable story about Suzanne’s time, many years before, at the university. The last time I wrote about Adrienne Kennedy’s masterwork “Ohio State Murders” was in January, 2021, when it was available digitally, as a staged reading, by Round House Theatre, in association with the McCarter Theatre Center. “Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est,” the first ancient line of Latin goes: “Where charity and love are, there God is.” Beatrice isn’t sure about the God bit, but the wide arc of the show-from Advent to Advent, dark to dark-doubles down on the idea that somewhere in the deep shadows of memory there’s often a ravishing spark. At first, he and Kat (who is described in Jonas’s stage directions as “A Fully Adult Woman”) share a convivial, tender mentor-pupil connection, but as the play unfolds the relationship takes on swiftly darkening shades of something stranger and far less appropriate.Īt one point, the teens sing a favorite hymn of mine. Chris is clearly lost, and in certain ways quite dumb, but sometimes he speaks in long rafts of wise poetry that come to him seemingly unbidden. Those two elements, his sincere interest in God and his troubledness, push him into closer contact with Kat. He’s a newish member of the church, full of adolescent piety and forlorn resentment toward his alcoholic dad. Chris (Cole Doman) is obviously Kat’s favorite. All the other members of the cast play teens, full of keening intensity, who make up Kat’s youth group. Otherwise, the adults are mostly notable for their absence. Banakis’s subtle and efficient set, makes good use of the stage’s similarity-in both function and design-to the pulpit. Jonas casts the audience as the adults of the congregation: audience members are given a pamphlet to keep up with the “service,” and are sometimes conscripted into long passages of call-and-response as Kat leads the proceedings. The play gains its energy and its structure by juicing comedy-another kind of masking redaction-from the foibles of people for whom religion is less a metaphysical horizon than a way to play social games. The parishioners are respectable, restrained people who don’t like to hear stuff about fire and brimstone from the pulpit on Sunday mornings. When Kat preaches, in her hokey style, she wears a jazzy mantle. What we can tell about the church, though, is that it’s liberal and mainline Protestant. The show and its author seem to want to both confess and protect, perform and be private, all at once. Those redactions, and others that pop up throughout the play’s text-we never, for instance, learn any of the main characters’ last names-give it the feeling of an ardent but guarded memory. “Redacted Church, in Redacted, New Jersey,” the church’s youth pastor, Rev Kat (Hannah Cabell), calls it in a sermon. It’s Christmas Eve, at a church whose full name we never learn, in a more or less well-off, implicitly suburban town in New Jersey. Julia May Jonas’s very funny, often moving new play, “Your Own Personal Exegesis,” directed by Annie Tippe at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theatre, starts out at just this time of year. It’s nice to trudge inside, even in a gloomy mood, and warm your hands by drama’s hearth. In this slogging terrain, the lights of the theatre feel like promises of warmth to come. By the late afternoon, the palette of the street is all black sky and bright lights, neon reflected in smears on puddled pavement. Going to plays these days is like looking at a painting by Jane Dickson, whose work chronicles an older, more dangerous, less commercially anesthetized Times Square.
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