Why Is ‘Slave Play’?
Another take in the sea of takes on this supposedly radical and searing satirical play about how racism affects love.
As the theatre queer I am not, going into this play, the most I knew about it was that it exists. And of the writer, Jeremy O. Harris: that he is a new Black and queer voice in the otherwise (and unsurprisingly) white world of Playwrights doing radical work. A friend of mine mentioned this ‘Slave Play’ and Harris to me in passing a few months back, and said he wanted to see it. A few weeks ago, he made the decision to buy him and me tickets to see it, which is really the only reason I would’ve seen this play otherwise. And this is how I ended up at The Golden Theatre on a Saturday afternoon in 2019 to witness this play.
I can’t say that I’m better for having seen it.
I wouldn’t recommend watching this play to any person of color, especially a Black person, unless you have a very rudimentary understanding of racism and desirability politics (aka the understanding of how social biases — racism, misogyny, queer- and transphobia, fatphobia, etc. — affect our ideas of what and who is and isn’t attractive). There’s nothing to gain from a play that doesn’t seem to be written with the intention of reaching Black audience members, even despite half of the vast being Black and the playwright himself being Black.
If you’re white, you’ll likely be able to get something from the play since it seems like its intention is to speak solely to the white people who’ll attend the play. It doesn’t seem like Harris wrote the play with the intention of making Black people feel seen outside of the White Gaze.
To give a bit of context: The title ‘Slave Play’ is play on the race play fetish where the people involved derive sexual pleasure from acting out the explicit power imbalances between partners of mixed race (ex: Black partners pretending to be slaves for their white partner(s)). In ‘Slave’, the characters are four pairs of partners — three pairs are involved in the acting out of three different scenarios, and one pair are the researchers conducting the experiment — involved in “antebellum sexual performance therapy” where each of the Black partners are slaves on MacGregor Plantation who end up having sex with their white partners who play various different white people of differing roles on a Plantation (Kaneisha (Eboni Flowers) plays a slave who ends up having sex with Jim (Paul Alexander Nolan) who plays an overseer, Philip (Sullivan Jones) plays a x who ends up having sex with Alana (Annie McNamara) who’s the Mistress of the plantation, and Gary (Ato Blankson-Wood) plays a slave who ends up having sex with Dustin (James Cusati-Moyer) a white indentured servant).
That all lasts for about twenty minutes until Jim says the safe word, effectively ending the role-play aspect of the therapy and thrusting us into about ninety minutes worth of talk therapy facilitated by Tea (Chalia La Tour) and Patricia (Irene Sofia Lucio) — a lesbian research couple who created this experiment to deal with the racial dynamics of their own relationship, and similarly mirroring Gary and Dustin’s relationship in that one partner is Black, andthe other is a white-passing Latinx person — that deconstructs how racism is both at the heart of each pair’s desire to be together and the reason why the Black partners don’t get sexual pleasure from their white partners anymore, and essentially breaking up three of the four relationships we’re watching.
I will admit that some aspects of the talk therapy were interesting. Namely the idea of interracial Black and white/white-passing partners talking openly about how whiteness and Blackness interact when it comes to love and sex — the desirability of the former being something taught from birth, and the desirability of the latter being relegated to fetishism — however, the conversations happen with the sole intent of speaking to white audience members in the way that white people think Black partners struggling with desirability politics would speak about it: angrily.
And while there is a lot of anger to be had when you realize just what it means to be Black in the world in the context of beauty standards in contrast to white people, the anger in this play is to the detriment of everything. The characters are told to “speak from a place of aggression” and to use that as a way to move the conversations forward, but we’re never really given a reason to care about the characters enough for their anger to feel justified enough to have them yelling at their white/white-passing partners about how they feel about realizing that their Blackness is not seen in full by their partners (both Jim and Alana see Kanesha and Philip as separate from their Blackness — Jim. We’re expected to wear the shoes of these angry Black characters without any real reason why outside of abstractly knowing that Black people have every right to be angry at white people for centuries of evolving oppression.
Harris, and many other reviews, wants us to believe that there’s some passionate, deeply moving, and critical take on the subject of desirability politics in Black/white interracial relationships and on whiteness, more broadly, that simply isn’t there. Not unless you are willing to leave all you know about racism, particularly in the context of desirability politics, at the door. Or are willfully unaware of the issue. I went into this play blind, and left feeling like if I had never seen this play not only would I not be missing anything I would also have found a better way to spend two hours on a Saturday afternoon.
And then there’s the final scene of the play that happens literally for no reason whatsoever. I understand that since we started off the play with Kaneisha and Jim’s story, it seemed appropriate that we close the play with a focus on them — endings being conversations with beginnings and all — however, what we’re left with after having watched eight characters passionately convey empty ideas of race’s role in desirability politics is the rape of the one dark-skinned Black woman by her white husband after having just told him that she thinks he’s a virus, and the child of demons (aka a descendant of the white people who created racism and slavery as we know them today). The scene tries to be a mirror of Kaneisha and Jim’s role play during the experiment, but it just left me wondering why this scene needed to happen, and what the point of the play was overall if this is the ending we’re given. Kaneisha thanks Jim for raping her because he calls her a negress like she asks him to at the beginning of the play. Why? There’s literally no explanation aside from the fact that Jim finally listens to Kaneisha.
The late, great Toni Morrison did an interview some years back when she talks about not writing for the White Gaze. In an interview with The New Yorker, Donald Glover talks about how, even though his intent is to write for Black audiences but he doesn’t know how to really do that because of how inescapable the White Gaze is. Harris seems to want to follow that trend of Black writers writing for themselves/people like them; however, this play lacks any of the self-awarness it thinks it has.
