Slave Play on Broadway

photo: Matthew Murphy

Golden Theatre, 2019

Earlier this week a video of a Slave Play Q&A was making the rounds on social media, including playwright Jeremy O. Harris’s own feed, showing a white woman who had a strong reaction to the play and had some things to say. I was at the end of writing a long paragraph cataloguing the incident before I stopped and thought, you know, this person has gotten plenty of airtime already. Slave Play itself returns again and again to the ways in which white folks manage to place themselves and their experience at the center of the conversation, pushing aside the voices and truths of black folks. So: I should be doing my best to amplify the play itself, and Harris’s own discussion of it. There are some great interviews with him here, here, and (with Lynn Nottage!) here.

There is so much that is exciting about Slave Play as a cultural event—its very presence on Broadway, the production’s commitment to affordability, Harris scamming Seth Meyers—that it’s easy to overlook the fact that it is a very good play. Harris is in the tricky territory of allegory, but his characters—three interracial couples and their unconventional sex therapists—both serve their function as archetypes and work as individuals. (I was particularly persuaded by the couple played by Sullivan Jones and Annie McNamara, whose performances were respectively under- and over-baked to perfection.) The play is smartly structured as well: it first coats itself in delirious, sticky absurdity, until the claustrophobic centerpiece scene strips away any sense that this might all go down nice and easy. Using the device of a group therapy session (in which, via Clint Ramos’s ingenious mirrored set, the audience is implicitly included), this scene is able to speak openly and directly about race relations in America without ever condescending or preaching to the audience. And, after keeping the words and ideas and arguments in the air for so long, Harris’s final scene returns us viscerally and painfully to the body, and to the individual stakes and felt experience of historical trauma.

Between the three roleplay scenes that open the play, that house-of-mirrors set, and the authority figures watching over it all while playing out their own power dramas, I couldn’t help thinking of Jean Genet’s The Balcony—another queer writer’s excavation of how social and systemic roles have ingrained themselves inside of our desires. Both plays are concerned with self-image, with the fantasy of who we think we are or would like to be, and the discomfort and violence that explode when that fantasy slides up against reality. There’s a specifically queer kinship, too, between the two works, in their focus on what happens when the struggles and injustices of the outside world burst into the bedroom—where of course they have been resident all along.

I am not a fan of the media discourse that positions Harris as a “provocateur,” or “enfant terrible,” or any other Frenchified way of calling the playwright a messy bitch who lives for drama. It’s boring, and it does a disservice to both his skills and acumen. What Harris has done is to survey the cultural landscape, identify a vital conversation that is not happening, and create the space that allows, demands it to happen. This is not stirring the pot, this is an artist doing their job, and well. If anything, Harris is a scammer: the people’s scammer, pulling off a delicate, audacious feat that leaves some people pressed while bringing enormous benefit to others. The thief Genet would approve.