Slave Play is a three-act play by American playwright
Jeremy O. Harris about interracial relationships. Harris originally wrote the
play in his first year at the Yale School of Drama, and it debuted on a major
stage on November 19, 2018, in an off-Broadway New York Theatre Workshop
staging directed by Robert O'Hara. It opened on Broadway at the John Golden
Theatre on October 6, 2019. In 2019, Slave Play was nominated for Best
Play in the Lucille Lortel Awards, and Claire Warden won an Outstanding Fight
Choreography Drama Desk Award for her work in the play
The first act,
"Work",begins on a southern cotton plantation before the Civil War.
The audience sees three private meetings of three interracial couples, each of
which ends in sex. Overseer Jim has sex with enslaved Kaneisha; mistress Alana
demands that mixed-race Phillip play the violin before she uses a dildo to penetrate
him, and white servant Dustin fights with Black overseer Gary before they
engage in sexual intimacy.
When Kaneisha asks
to be called a "negress", Jim uses a safeword. With the appearance of
a pair of psychoanalysts and counselors, Thea and Patricia (also of different
races and, as it turns out later, in a relationship), the audience is told that
in reality the characters are modern couples participating in a role-playing
exercise meant to improve intimacy between white and Black partners. The second
act, "Process", is dedicated to a group therapy session among the
three couples.
In the third act,
"Exorcise", the focus shifts back to Jim and Kaneisha. She
tells him that he does not listen to her, and she now that the problem in their
relationship is not in her, but in Jim's race. She refers in particular to the
extermination of the indigenous peoples of the Americas by European
colonialists. Jim returns to his overseer role and orders Kaneisha to have sex
with him, until she says the safeword and they stop. Kaneisha thanks Jim for
listening.
Author Jeremy O.
Harris has said that he wrote Slave Play during his first year at the
Yale School of Drama. (Harris graduated in 2019.) In October 2017, a
production of Slave Play was presented at the Yale School of Drama as
part of the annual Langston Hughes Festival.
The play was
announced for the 2018-2019 season of the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW)
and was taken into the development
program of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater
Center. Later that month, Robert O'Hara who had known Harris since his brief studies
at De Paul University and was one of his teachers at Yale, was announced as
director. At the end of July 2018, the first public reading of the work was
held at the conference.
Previews of the
production at NYTW, under the patronage of the production company Seaview
Productions, began on November 19, 2018. Due to high demand, the duration of
the show's run was extended before the official December 9 premiere, with the
final performance being postponed from the original closing date of December
30, 2018, to January 13, 2019. Over the next two weeks, tickets for all
performances sold out.
John Golden Theatre
