Race relations are examined at a much deeper and more complex level in Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, now on Broadway at the Golden. The play opens on Clint Ramos’ mirrored set, reflecting images of an antebellum Southern plantation. Three interracial couples, each a variation on the slave and master set-up and dressed by Dede Ayite in character-defining 19th century costumes, engage in power dynamics which quickly become sexual. The occasional slipping into 21st century slang or the incongruous intrusion of Rihanna’s “Work” on the sound system reveals all is not quite as it seems.
Spoiler Alert Since the play has already had a successful run Off-Broadway last season at New York Theater Workshop, it will not be too much of a spoiler to continue with the plot, but if you want to be surprised by the twist, which is kind of predictable, skip ahead.
One of the characters calls out “Starbucks” and the amorous action stops. It turns out these are contemporary couples engaging in a radical form of therapy, acting out fantasies of black and brown servitude and white supremacy to get the root of their sexual dysfunction. Two cliche-spouting therapists then conduct a group session “unpacking” the participants’ interactions which is theorized to be based on centuries of racial oppression.
Slave Play is a startling choice for a Broadway transfer since Harris unflinchingly delves into uncomfortable territory with a razor-sharp wit which cuts like a scalpel through polite liberal assumptions on race. Director Robert O’Hara skillfully balances riotous comic staging with searing pathos as all the lovers and their counsellors rip off their masks and bares their wounds and psyches.
Joaquina Kalukango, the only new addition to company from the Off-Broadway run, is shattering as the most vulnerable of the patients. As Kaneisha, the suppressed African-American wife of the suffocatingly white, British and proper Jim (an appropriately wound-up and buttoned-down Paul Alexander Nolan), she holds in her repressed desires and conflicted emotions for much of the play and then releases them like a volcano in a marathon monologue, summing up Harris’s thought-provoking and barbed observations on the state of race relations today.
Annie McNamara still garners loads of laughs as the politically correct Alana getting in touch with her inner dominatrix. The gorgeous Sullivan Jones finds new levels to Philip, Alana’s seemingly above-it-all husband while Ato Blankson-Wood and James Cusati-Moyer as a gay couple adeptly juggle satire, affection, and rage. Chalia La Tour and Irene Sofia Lucio are a bit broad as the therapists—themselves a pair with issues—but they expose the duo’s rifts and pretensions with verve.
