Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play was written six years ago when the African-American playwright was a student at Yale. His play, which deals with race and sexuality in the USA, is very much a young man’s work, packed with scatological humor, wild experimentation and provocative ideas. Thanks to its boldness and power, the play was produced off-Broadway (by New York Theatre Workshop) when Harris was still a student. It then went to Broadway in 2019 and received twelve Tony nominations , sparking controversy the whole time.
Now Slave Play has come to L.A., with many of the NY actors repeating their roles, directed once again by Robert O’Hara. The set designer, Clint Ramos, is also a veteran of previous productions; this time around he has given the play a striking and original look, with towering upstage mirrors forming the backdrop — and putting the audience into the action, as it were. On either side of the thrust stage are illuminations of an ante-bellum plantation.
Ante-bellum figures strongly in the play’s opening and best scene, which is set back in slave times and investigates the sexual dynamics between a black woman, Kaneisha (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy) and her white overseer, Phillip (Jonathan Higginbotham). It’s a master-slave relationship that was played out countless times in our history, with rape most often the outcome.
The next scene, between a caricatured Southern belle and another beleaguered black man, reverses the relationship, with the woman cock-teasing the male and ultimately raping him with a dildo.
And so it goes with this bawdy, audacious play, which as one critic said, “makes the case for mutual lust and jealousy as the basis for conflict in America.”
In Slave Play’s third scene, we meet three couples (a mixture of white and black) who have met as a group, with two “researchers” confronting and provoking them with sharp, rude questions. The results, we are told, will be announced as part of an experimental program, “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy.” The satire was sharp and funny for about five minutes, but fizzled out over the long haul (nearly half an hour).
Slave Play closes with Kaneisha and Jim (Paul Alexander Nolan), her white husband, picking up the sexual cudgels, with the final words going to Kaneisha, who has come to the conclusion that the legacy of white supremacy has destroyed any chance of the marriage ever working. The demons of the past cannot be exorcised.
