It is week two of rehearsals for a production that promises to be one of the theatre events of the year – the London premiere of the American sensation Slave Play – and a fold-up metal chair is taking a battering. There is an ear-splitting clang as it is repeatedly flung to the floor in order to perfect a fraught scene involving a group therapy session for sexually dysfunctional couples. When the chair accidentally grazes the arm of one actor in the couple, the other – who threw it – becomes momentarily distraught. In swoops the woman who doubles as intimacy coordinator and fight director with calming words and instructions on how to keep the scene safe. This fleeting incident is a measure of how intense rehearsals are for a play that breaks racial and sexual taboos to an extent that is rare, if not unprecedented, in the commercial theatre.
The chair-throwing confrontation involves one of three interracial couples who have resorted to “antebellum sexual performance therapy” in an attempt to salvage sex lives that have been destroyed by the historical baggage of their differing skin colours. This therapy consists of enacting extreme plantation-era fantasies and then deconstructing them. For Dustin and Gary (played respectively by one of five Tony-nominated actors from the Broadway production, James Cusati-Moyer, and the new British recruit Fisayo Akinade), the fantasy explodes from a fight to rough sex between a white indentured servant and his black enslaved overseer. When I visit, the actors are rehearsing the deconstruction scene.
“I’m not white. I can’t be white,” insists Dustin, who has just performed the servant. “You always say you’re not white but what are you?” thunders Gary. “You just get to exist in this ambiguity of ‘nonwhiteness’… I’m black black black, blue black, jet black, raisin black, eerie black. People have seen so much colour in me they could make a new rainbow with the shade, but they always go back to black.” As the stage directions make clear: “This is a play about shades, colours, as much as it’s about race.” The directions also state that it is intended to be “a comedy of sorts, and should be played as such”.
Among those watching the scene unfold in the south London rehearsal room is the play’s 35-year-old author, Jeremy O Harris, who wrote the initial draft of the play in his first year as a graduate student at Yale school of drama. Though he is now also an actor and a producer, with six projects of various kinds on the go (and Rihanna on speed dial), it is Slave Play that has caught the wind. So far it has sailed an eight-year course, from student readings to an off-Broadway production and on to Broadway itself, where it picked up what at the time in 2020 was a record 12 Tony nominations. Though it didn’t win any of them, it had become a social phenomenon that reached far beyond typical well-heeled audiences. An HBO documentary about this journey, directed by Harris himself, will have its premiere at New York’s Tribeca film festival on 10 June.
In a nod to the controversy the play has attracted along the way, the film opens with a furious intervention by a woman at a Q&A after a performance, about discrimination against poor white mothers. Though the Broadway run attracted little flak, its early days were a different story. Death threats were made against members of the cast. The hashtag #ShutDownSlavePlay was set up and a petition circulated calling for the drama to be halted.
News that Slave Play was coming to the UK was initially overshadowed by a row about plans to hold two “black out” nights during its 13-week run. Black Out nights – designed to allow people of colour to watch the play “free from the white gaze” – have been happening in the US since 2019, arriving in London in 2022 with Harris’s acclaimed play Daddy at the Almeida theatre. But despite assurances that no one had yet been turned away, Downing Street waded in with a tin-eared warning that “clearly, restricting audiences on the basis of race would be wrong and divisive”.
Harris responded with characteristic ebullience. “Hey 10 Downing Street and Rishi Sunak,” he tweeted on X, “… there’s literally a war going on … maybe the death of thousands of Palestinian children should be more ‘concerning’ than a playwright attempting to make the West End more inclusive to those who aren’t historically invited there.” It has since been announced that 30 pay-what-you can tickets will be released every Wednesday in a drive to encourage anyone who is unable to afford West End prices.
In person, Harris is a 6ft 5in ball of energy, foppishly dressed in a tweed jacket, retro tank top and tie, who bounces between sitting down to be interviewed and striding around the room taking video calls, with a cup of iced coffee in one hand and his phone in the other. At one point his multitasking surreally merges into one as he pauses to take a slurp of his coffee, while holding his mobile out to introduce me to a group of people he is talking into supporting a play he’s producing by an old college friend.
Most of the controversy over Slave Play has been generated by people who haven’t seen it, he insists, before admitting that it actually goes right back to its earliest days, when a female faculty adviser at Yale took strong exception to his portrayal of a young black woman, Kaneisha, who finds resolution through a challenging submission fantasy. “I feel like if that person, and a lot of the faculty at Yale, had had their way, I would have had a mental breakdown and this play would never have existed. I felt really under attack with it,” he says. “That person said: ‘You’re making one of the most misogynistic choices I’ve ever seen made. This is a vile, vile thing to do and, by the way, other people think so too but are too afraid to tell you.’ And it was this weird moment where I’m the student who’s being told I have all this power and I’m so scary. And the last thing I wanted to do with a play was hurt people.”
Harris, who exorcised the trauma in a scatological experimental play, Yell: A Documentary of My Time Here, clearly knows his theatre history. He cites Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane and Debbie Tucker Green among his role models, and there are clear echoes, in the first two of Slave Play’s three acts, of Churchill’s feminist classic Top Girls, which similarly follows a comedic historical cosplay with a modern-day political deconstruction. “I wanted to work within a tradition that excited me, that asked daring, complex questions,” he says, while pointing out his research is not done through books, but through the various tabs he has open at all times on his computer when he’s working. “I let my brain follow things it’s excited by.”
Fortunately, the play also immediately began to gather supporters, including the actors Chalia La Tour and Irene Sofia Lucio, who have played the roles of the two therapists since the very first readings. Director Robert O’Hara was one of Harris’s professors at Yale when he was sent the script for consideration out of the blue. O’Hara recalls reading through it with his husband in bed. “My first reaction was, like: ‘Why am I always the person that they send the outrageous crazy shit to?’ And then I got to the end of the first act. And I said:‘Oh, I know why’ – because the second act was a deconstruction of everything I had just read. It did exactly what it was trying to do, which impressed me a lot.”
O’Hara was clear from the off that the play needed an intimacy coordinator to help with its explicit enactments of sex and subjugation. So he got in touch with Claire Warden, who credits the play with introducing her role to the New York theatre as a proper job. She read the script on a bus. “I remember thinking, first: ‘How the hell are we going to do this?’ And, second: ‘We have to do this,’” she says. “When I spoke to Robert, he said: ‘I don’t want you coming in here and making everybody comfortable, because it’s an uncomfortable play.’ But that’s not what intimacy coordination is about: it’s about making actors feel they can commit to it bravely and frankly, and tell these powerful stories without damaging themselves as human beings.”
In the first workshops, says O’Hara: “We just thought it was a new play by a very exciting playwright. But when we started the [off-Broadway] presentation, there was a lot of anxiety from New York Theatre Workshop in terms of how should they have a conversation about it? How should they prepare their audiences? And I always said: ‘If you’re going to put the word “slave” on the side of a building, then you should not come in thinking that you’re going to find comfort.’ From the start, there was genuine interest, and not just in a new voice, but in the themes and the ideas inside the play.” Madonna, Whoopi Goldberg, Scarlett Johansson and Stephen Sondheim were among the stars who went along to check it out.
But that was as far as O’Hara – or anyone involved – thought it would go. When he was approached about taking it to Broadway, he first thought the producers must be having him on and then that they were crazy. “It was a downtown theatre show,” he says. “But when we got to Broadway, we realised that there was a space for this type of work that Broadway did not usually accommodate. There was space for boldness and a level of intrigue around race and sex in American and British history. And so it became a conversation that has grown in each iteration of it.”
The New York Times agreed. In the run-up to the show, it ran a preview headlined: “Is Broadway ready for Slave Play?”; after it had closed, it followed up with an interview-based wrap-up titled: “Was Broadway ready for Slave Play?” It concluded that although the show hadn’t recouped its costs, it had brought in 100,000 people to the 800-seat theatre over 19 weeks, so the answer had to be yes. It helped, says O’Hara, to have a writer who was happy to engage on social media and defend his play publicly against criticism, because that took the responsibility off the people in the rehearsal room: “Allowing the play to be the conversation and not thinking that you had to defend the play as you create it.”
Among the couples looking on with rapt attention during Dustin and Gary’s confrontation with the chair are Kaneisha and Jim, played by two of the new recruits to the cast for the West End run. Olivia Washington plays Kaneisha, the character who caused all the fuss back in the play’s early days and who remains its most challenging character. She is a black American, married to a white British expat, whose plantation fantasy involves twerking for an overseer who brandishes a whip and forces her to eat a melon from the floor. Her husband, played by Kit Harington, is mortified by the role this forces on him.
No sooner was this new casting announced than a fresh controversy struck up about the deleterious impact of star casting in West End shows. Harington, who made his name as the charismatic Jon Snow in Game of Thrones, is contemptuous. “It’s my sixth professional play, so it’s not like I’m new to theatre,” he says. “We’re actors. We’re just doing the play because we want to.”
Washington, who is Hollywood royalty – the daughter of Denzel and Pauletta Washington – saw the play off-Broadway as a fairly new drama school graduate. “I just remember feeling that the experience was incomplete. I had no idea what the story was about. But after watching it, I immediately felt I have to read this, because I know I missed things. And I was right. I did miss things. I think what I love about Kaneisha is that she’s very sure about the things that she wants for herself. And that that’s not really dictated by what people around her think is a good idea. So I think it’s just about having to be comfortable with not necessarily being a perfect idea of a young black woman today.”
She has no qualms about her parents coming to see it, she says. “My family comes to everything that I do, so I think it would be weirder if they didn’t come. Neither my mom nor my dad have done theatre in London, so I think they’re very proud to see me in this space.”
In these febrile times, when appropriation of any kind has become a red line, it may seem not only presumptuous but reckless for a man to reach so boldly into the sexual fantasies of women. But Harris is having none of it. “I think that as a queer man, there’s a history in literature, from Tennessee Williams to Hanya Yanagihara, of queer men and odd women having a sort of a natural relationship. There is a marriage of these identities that I think means there can be some sublimation, and a sense that, through the act of writing, one can easily step inside a space that has certain psychic parallels. I’m a triple, a quadruple Gemini, so I’d say Kaneisha represents one of many parts of myself.”
In some ways – because they’re on the wrong side of both history and gender – Slave Play is hardest on its white male characters. The documentary shows actors struggling in rehearsal with even speaking some of the more taboo words. How does Harington feel he will cope with having to act out extreme domination scenes eight times a week? Though Jim is cast as the aggressor, the enactment comes from Keneisha’s imagination, which makes him the fall guy of a bilious sort of comedy.
“What I’m already finding is, if you live with any character, you need to feel and empathise with them, and if they’re repetitively the butt of a joke, it can get kind of painful in a strange way,” says the actor. “He has his faults, obviously. But I love him, and I know he means well, and he’s getting laughed at. I think that may be the point where it gets difficult.”
In discussions early on in rehearsals, it became clear that slavery had not played as big a part in the history education of the British company members as it had for their American colleagues. “When we learned about slavery – at least when I was at school and I have to assume it’s not changed much – we learn that it’s an American thing that happened over there,” says Harington. “We don’t tend to learn about the British part in it, and I think that’s kind of shocking.” The risk, he adds, “is that a British audience may be titillated and shocked, but try to sit back from it and talk and think about it like it’s an American play with American issues. And I think it’s our challenge to try to not let them do that.”
Though this is the first time Jim has been played by a British actor, his Britishness is an important part of the play, points out O’Hara. “Britain invented slavery. It is the birthplace of what became American slavery, you know, and this character has a disconnect. He’s with a black woman who grew up in the south, who visited plantations, and he has absolutely no relationship to the history of slavery. So he’s ended up with that black wife in a therapy session that is all about something that he has been in complete denial of, for his entire existence, and now he must confront it.”
That, he concludes, is the blind spot the play is dealing with. “If you don’t know where you came from, and what was here before you, then you will end up repeating it, and to your detriment.”
In the eight years of the play’s life, the world around it has changed; the energy and fury around Black Lives Matter and #MeToo have abated. How does Harris feel this has affected it? “I don’t know that my world has changed at all,” he replies. “The biggest thing that has changed for me as far as my social world is concerned is that I wrote this play before I had had a long-term relationship, and now I’m about to get married. That’s a significant shift of worldview for me.”
But then he changes tack, saying he conceived the play in the aftermath of the murder of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012. “As a black American, who grew up in the south, who also was witnessing the Black Lives Matter moment that came on the back of that, it was very funny to stage it in 2018 and 2019, and then bring it back to Broadway in 2021, post the George Floyd protests. People were like: ‘Oh my god, it’s so much deeper now. I get it more.’ And I’m like: ‘How?’ I became confused by a notion that there was ever a moment when white supremacy was hidden from view, because it was never hidden from me. It felt very much a part of my social life, my work life and the life that I was seeing people live, even here, across the ocean.”
Now that he has settled into his stride there is no stopping him. “Rishi Sunak is the first person of colour to be the prime minister. Right?” he declares. “I have French friends who tell me all the time: ‘We don’t have the same race problems you guys have in America.’ But I’m like: ‘There are so many brown people in your country who will never reach the height of your judiciary or your executive at all. And yet you tell me that there’s not a race problem here?’ There are so many women that aren’t at the top of these places, and we think that we don’t have a gender problem?
“So I think that, yes, the world has changed around the play, but I think the reason it is still able to garner audiences is because these questions are going to be around for a very long time. We’ve barely even got to the middle of unpacking the box of colonialism and racism.”
He flips open one of the many tabs on his phone to the previous day’s cover of the Hollywood Reporter. It is titled “Drama queens” and features seven of Hollywood’s hottest stars. Not one of them is black. “And, you know,” he says, “the fact that we went from 2020, when everyone was putting up a black square [on their Instagram feeds] and saying Black Lives Matter, to this? From: ‘I’m reading bell hooks for the first time’ to now having trouble finding a single black actress in a drama series? It’s shocking.”
He waits a beat for an acknowledgment that he’s right – and of course he is. Then off he bounces, following his brain to all the other things it’s excited by.
• Slave Play is at the Noël Coward theatre, London, from 29 June to 21 September
