“Slaving Away at Sex”
[Note: this
is an updated, expanded version of the review posted here for the play’s Off-Broadway
production, seen December 13, 2018.]
The move to Broadway of Slave Play, Jeremy O. Harris’s provocative, award-winning play about the intersection of race and sex in American society, first produced at the New York Theatre Workshop in the East Village this past winter, must have come as a surprise to many of those who saw it there. Its subject matter, literary mannerisms, and envelope-pushing production elements are not what ordinarily passes for commercial entertainment.
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| Above: Irene Sofia Lucio, Chalia La Tour. Below: Ato Blankson-Wood, James Cusati-Moyer, Sullivan Jones, Annie McNamara, Joaquina Kalukango, Paul Alexander Nolan. All photos: Matthew Murphy. |
Slave Play’s Off-Broadway reception, while largely positive, was
not universally so, which is also true of the Broadway production, although many
powerful critical voices among the 25 already blurbed on Show-Score.com—including
the New York Times—strongly support it. My own reaction, now as then, is
less enthusiastic.
In
most respects, the Broadway production replicates the Off-Broadway one. Only
one player has been changed, Joaqina Kalukango now taking the part of Kaneisha,
originally played (very well) by Teyonah Paris. Clint Ramos’s striking set,
looking perhaps a bit more substantial than before, continues to provide a
background composed of a mirrored wall, reminiscent of those in shows like A
Chorus Line and Cabaret, with built-in entranceways.
The
painting of a plantation placed along the back wall of the East Village venue
has been replaced by a long, narrow, illuminated image situated along the front
of the mezzanine section over the heads of the audience in the orchestra
seating. Although it’s not clear, the intention would seem to be to implicate
us in the play’s ideas regarding the antebellum South.
Personally,
I never felt connected to what was being shown—but 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, on and Off Broadway. You may
or may not agree with Harris (a Yale playwriting student who describes himself
as “Tall,
lanky, queer, and black”) but it’s likely he’ll give you something to talk about
afterward if you see the play with someone else.
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| Joaquina Kalukango, Paul Alexander Nolan. |
It
begins with three successive scenes set in the antebellum South, at the
MacGregor Plantation near Richmond, Virginia, each dealing with interracial
sexual relationships. In the first, a young black woman, Kaneisha, 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 in large, transparent, lowercase
letters. When the whip-carrying, white overseer (not master), Jim (Paul
Alexander Noble, Welcome to Margaritaville), sees this, the pair
act out the sexual dynamics of their situation.
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| Annie McNamara, Sullivan Jones. |
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 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.
The
third switches to Gary (Ato Blankson-Wood), a black slave who holds sway over a
white indentured servant, Dustin (James Cusati-Moyer). Now, the shifting power
plays involve the men’s homosexual attraction.
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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| James Cusati-Moyer, Ato Blankson-Wood. |
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, as she herself notes, fair-skinned) Teá (Chalia La Tour).
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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| Company of Slave Play. |
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. Racial
politics aside, they seem no different than those affecting any couple, regardless
of race. The difficult-to-accept premise does, however, have the benefit of
allowing for an open discussion, exaggerated as it often is, of boiling racial feelings
and beliefs.
However,
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. More often than not, the intention seems to be to eviscerate
the pomposity of pseudo-scientific researchers and psychotherapists and the
overblown psychological sensitivities of couples seeing therapy.
Seeing
the play again only served to make the characters—both analysts and analysands—behave like self-involved drama queens and kings, not real people concerned with
serious issues. Few non-musical Broadway plays offer their casts the nearly
operatic opportunities for histrionic hyperbole that Slave Play does.
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 verbose (particularly a final monologue by Kaneisha when alone with
Jim in their bedroom), its characters more symbols than people, its
dramatic tension secondary to its theoretical pyrotechnics, and, given its
content, its intermissionless two hours too damned long.
Golden Theatre
252 W. 45th St., NYC
Through January 19
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