"Sex, Slaves, and Racial Hangups"
Given the rising prevalence of alley
staging, as it’s sometimes called, the first thing that struck me on entering
the New York Workshop Theatre to see Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, was that the space had been divided by innovative designer
Clint Ramos in two so that the stage was a platform between two facing sets of
bleachers.
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| Teyonah Paris, Paul Alexander Nolan. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
A moment later I realized I was looking at only one set of bleachers,
the one I was sitting in, reflected in a mirrored wall, reminiscent of the
original sets for Cabaret and A Chorus Line, among others. Thanks to my baseball
cap, I even found myself in it. Looking more closely, I noticed the reflection
of a painting of a plantation situated on the wall behind me. It’s the kind of
effect sometimes used to implicate the audience in a play’s ideas.
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| Paul Alexander Nolan, Teyonah Paris. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Whether that’s the purpose here is hard
to say—I never felt personally connected to what was being shown—but the highly
touted Harris’s award-winning Slave Play is
certainly a play of ideas, particularly with regard to the subject of identity
politics, which seems to preoccupy every other upcoming dramatist. You may or
may not agree with Harris (a Yale playwriting student who describes himself as “Tall,
lanky, queer, and black” and is here making his Off-Broadway debut) but it’s
likely he’ll give you something to talk about afterward if you see it with
someone else.
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| Teyonah Paris, Paul Alexander Nolan. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
It begins with three successive scenes
set in the antebellum South, at the MacGregor Plantation near Richmond, VA, each
dealing with interracial sexual relationships. In the first, a beautiful young
black woman, Kaneisha (Teyonah Paris, If
Beale Street Could Talk), fitfully sweeps the AstroTurf-covered stage before
her sexual impulses get her to twerking to Rihanna singing “Work.” Its words,
“nuh body touch me you nuh righteous,” line the top of the mirrored wall. When the
whip-carrying, white overseer, Jim (Paul Alexander Noble, Welcome to Margaritaville), sees this, the pair act out the sexual
dynamics of their situation.
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| Sullivan Jones, Annie McNamara. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
In the second, for which a fourposter is rolled on through doors in the mirrored wall, Alana (Annie McNamara), the white mistress of a plantation, seduces her handsome, violin-playing (Beethoven), reluctant black slave, Philip (Sullivan Jones). Here, the dynamics have to do with a dark brown dildo, although not in the way you might at first imagine.
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| Sullivan Jones, Annie McNamara. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
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| Annie McNamara. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Each scene uses period costuming (by
Dede Ayite) combined with anachronistic elements—like Alana’s thigh-high, vinyl
boots or Gary and Dustin’s brand-named underwear—as well as contemporary language
and music, and each ends in an aggressively passionate sexual act. Those, regardless
of what you may have read, may be provocative but they’re still far more
suggestive than explicit. The movies do this kind of thing better.
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| Ato Blankson-Wood, James Cusati-Moyer. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
It’s no longer a spoiler to reveal that what we’ve been watching has been three couples—each with one black and
one white partner—working out their intimacy problems by role-playing on the
fourth day of a weeklong, experimental, Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy
Workshop. Running the repetitious talkfest is a lesbian couple, the white
Patricia (Irene Sofia Lucio) and the black (but fair-skinned) Teá (Chalia La
Tour).
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| James Cusati-Moyer, Ato Blankson-Wood. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Teá and Patricia, speaking in faster-than-a-speeding-bullet
technobabble, explore, explain, and interrogate (with sharply satirical
undertones)—“process” is the operative word—each couple’s sexual dysfunction, diagnosed
as anhedonia (the
inability to experience pleasure). They believe that all such interracial
bedroom problems can be traced back to racially negative tendencies based on
premodern attitudes. The therapy is “designed to help black partners
re-engage intimately with white partners from whom they no longer receive
sexual pleasure.”
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| James Cusati-Moyer. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Whatever one thinks of Harris’s views, or
the degree of success the therapy seems to have in helping the workshop’s participants,
the unconventionally structured play fails to convince that racial attitudes
are behind their sexual problems, which—racial politics aside—seem no
different than those affecting anyone, regardless of race. Moreover, the
dialogue, while thoughtful, sometimes goes by so swiftly it’s often hard to
grasp. Under the animated direction of another important young playwright,
Robert O’Hara (author of Bootycandy, Barbecue), the lines are often fodder for long-winded monologues affording each character one or more operatic arias of
self-exposure.
Fortunately, each of the actors is emotionally
alive and verbally adept, able to make Harris’s words sound meaningful, and
sometimes humorous, even when the playwright’s tendency to overwrite forces
them to overact. Simply stated, Slave
Play is (particularly a final monologue by Kaneisha when alone with
Jim in their bedroom) verbose, its characters more symbols than people, its dramatic
tension secondary to its theoretical pyrotechnics, and, for its content, its intermissionless two
hours too damned long.
This spring will see another
Off-Broadway production of a Jeremy O. Harris play, “Daddy,” starring Alan
Cumming at the Vineyard. Hopefully, it will reflect a refinement of his already
apparent talent.
OTHER VIEWPONTS:
New York Theatre Workshop
79 E. 4th St., NYC
Through January 13