Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Jeremy O. Harris’s uncompromising, guttural SLAVE PLAY ferociously opens on Broadway

• By drediman
• October 7, 2019
• No Comments

Joaquina Kalukango and Paul Alexander Nolan in Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play” at the John Golden Theatre. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

Surely destined to be one of the most provocative offerings in many a season is Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, which ferociously opened last night on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre (the season is shaping up to be an uncommonly strong one for new plays, with the upcoming and anticipated The Inheritance and The Lehman Trilogy also in the mix). The play makes the transition to the Great White Way after having played Off-Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop last winter, particularly bold given the work’s audacious agenda and execution. For those of you not familiar with the play’s premise, Slave Play gazes directly at the relatively unexplored intersection between sexual desire and race, particularly within the context of interracial relationships.

Mr. Harris’s play is boisterous, challenging, and arguably excessive. Nevertheless, it’s also one of the most subversively entertaining (e.g., humiliation and explicit sexual content are not shied away from), guttural experiences I’ve ever encountered on Broadway. Slave Play peels away the layers of soot that have accumulated on the work’s subject matter. It uses satire – the play’s central conceit is an interracial couples sex therapy session that uses antebellum master-slave relationship “play” to investigate deficiencies in the bedroom (!) – to begin its excavation. But by the cathartic, almost unbearably watchable final scene, the most brutal account of empathy I’ve seen and one of the single most powerful stretches to be currently found onstage in New York, it seems like Mr. Harris may have hit upon the heart of things.

Be warned, Mr. Harris’s play and its uncompromising production by Robert O’Hara (a talented playwright himself), which has been tactfully expanded for Broadway, are potentially triggering. Slave Play is not for everyone; arguably it’s written for and directed at a specific demographic. I won’t sell the play short by laying my thoughts out on the matter; you should see it and make up your own mind. For me at least, the experience of the play is overwhelming. I thought so when I saw it at New York Theatre Workshop, and it’s even more so at the Golden, where the cast is giving even sharper, more deliciously caustic performances (special mention particularly to Joaquina Kalukango’s searing performance). Indeed, what seemed almost gratuitously in-your-face Off-Broadway now seems correctly-scaled in a larger space, positioning Slave Play for optimal impact.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

SLAVE PLAY
Broadway, Play
John Golden Theatre
2 hours (without an intermission)
Through January 5