Theatre: Slave Play at the John Golden Theatre (November 2019)

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