If you saw Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play and didn’t spend the next day or two (or three or four) processing it, did you really see Slave Play? You might have been at Broadway’s Golden Theatre, where it just opened—or at New York Theatre Workshop in late 2018, where it premiered and caused a major sensation—and you probably watched it, but did you really see it?
Because Slave Play—sharply and smartly directed by Robert O’Hara—is a show that needs to be processed. Admittedly, that is a terribly clinical way to put it. “Can you stop saying processing?” yells one character, Jim (Paul Alexander Nolan). “We aren’t computers. My emotions aren’t materials.” But fair warning: As the program note by poet-novelist Morgan Parker begins, “This might hurt.”
Jim and Kaneisha (Joaquina Kalukango) are the first couple we meet on the MacGregor Plantation, just outside of Richmond, Va. (To bring us all back to the old South, set designer Clint Ramos cleverly projects an image of the chalk-white mansion and the lush, manicured grounds onto the mezzanine overhang—and reflects it back to the whole theater by lining the entire stage with mirrors.) She is a slave, unenthusiastically sweeping the floor of a cottage…until Rihanna’s “Work” comes on, and then she’s dancing like no one’s watching. Pretty soon someone is—Jim, the property manager, who’s intrigued and turned on. And carrying a whip.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★★ review here.]
Inside the house, the pale blonde Mistress MacGregor (Annie McNamara) is hot and bothered and in serious need of a violin serenade. She beckons the handsome Phillip (Sullivan Jones), begging him to work his “mulatto magic.” Somehow, his playing has emboldened her. “I want to be inside you,” she declares. Seemingly out of nowhere, she produces a large black dildo (“On the night before my wedding, my mother gave me this”). You can probably guess the rest.
Outside, under the scorching Virginia sun, Dustin (James Cusati-Moyer), a white indentured servant, is slowly hauling bales of hay. Gary (Ato Blankson-Wood)—or Nigger Gary, as he’s called on the plantation—is showing him who’s boss, and definitely enjoying it. The sexual attraction is palpable, propelling the pair into a combative interpretive dance and climaxing, literally, in a boot worship scene.
But it’s not all fun and sex games. Warning: Here’s where you might want to stop reading if you haven’t seen Slave Play or if you don’t want a spoiler. We do know we weren’t actually in the pre–Civil War era South. Harris plants plenty of clues—the biggest of which is probably the hook-filled tune by a certain Barbadian singer/fashion mogul/lingerie queen/makeup magnate; one of the lyrics—“Nuh body touch me you nuh righteous”—even lines the top of the stage, each letter outlined in neon (a nod to Bronx-born artist Glenn Ligon, perhaps?). Kaneisha and Jim get into a lovers’-style quarrel over fruit: “Watermelons are green, on the outside, they green. Red in the middle,” she impatiently tells Jim, who confused it with a cantaloupe. Mistress MacGregor is wearing black patent thigh-high boots that look straight out of the Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog (I’m guessing). Dustin and Gary strip down to reveal matching Calvin Klein underwear.
But when all the couples gather in a brightly lit room and therapists Teá (Chalia La Tour) and Patricia (Irene Sofia Lucio) come out and start throwing around words like anhedonia—the inability to feel pleasure (Hedone was the Greek goddess of pleasure), clearly there’s something else at play: “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy,” Teá declares. “A RADICAL therapy designed to help black partners re-engage intimately with white partners from whom they no longer receive sexual pleasure.” It’s a technique, she explains, that she and Patricia developed at Smith and Yale (which Harris recently graduated from and where Slave Play had its premiere, incidentally).
Yet the most fascinating revelations from the talk therapy session aren’t related to the recent sex scenes; they’re in how the characters see themselves. Phillip throws it back to college, when he was a Division I soccer star: “This upperclassman like looked over and was like ‘Phillip isn’t a nigger, Phillip’s Phillip.’ And yeah I think, that that’s basically what everyone thinks of me,” he says. “I’m not black I’m not white I’m just Phillip.” Dustin—who’s an actor, and just a teensy bit dramatic—is vehemently, repeatedly “not white”; yet no one seems to know what he is. Meanwhile, Gary describes himself as “black black blue black jet black raisin black eerie black. People have seen so much color in me they could make a new rainbow with the shades but they always go back to black.” And it galls him that Dustin gets to “exist in this ambiguity of ‘non-whiteness.’”
Harris gets a lot of mileage out of the group-therapy vibe and the affirmations Teá and Patricia hand out like Kleenex. Patricia to Jim: “You are heard. You are affirmed.” Teá to Phillip: “I want you to know that I see you.” Teá to Patricia: “Know that I was hearing you.” But the section gets way too bogged down by psychobabble—granted, an easy target.
It’s not a spoiler to say that the road to resolution won’t be easy for these three couples. Harris doesn’t tie things up for us; neat and tidy isn’t his style (also on display earlier this year in his play “Daddy”). And he will give a couple characters a thorough emotional beating before evening’s end.
But amid the devastation, Harris intertwines uncommonly evocative, poetic imagery. “I remember how you looked at me that night at the bar when we first met,” Kaneisha says to Jim. (Kalukango and Nolan are breathtakingly good.) “How it felt when I first tasted your eyes on me.” His eyes tasted like Chardonnay.
Slave Play opened Oct. 6, 2019, at the John Golden Theatre and runs through Jan. 19, 2020. Tickets and information: slaveplaybroadway.com
