The Slave Play
Written by Jeremy O. Harris
Directed by Robert O’Hara
New York Theatre Workshop
December 26, 2018
Production website
💉💉💉💉 out of 5.

“White people still have the whip” claims Jeremy O’Harris in his crazy, rollarcoaster of a work, Slave Play.  It is perhaps the kinkiest and most unapologetic play I have seen in years. The crux of the play is a montage of three interracial couples (1. a young slave girl and her master; 2. An older plantation mistress with a biracial house slave; and 3. A white indentured laborer and the black male slave who oversees his work.  At the beginning of the play, these three couples are caught in the throughs of their erotic fantasy of domination and submission. The extremes that these couples live out their fantasies is quite extreme even for the audiences of New York’s Off-Broadway.   Characters are begging for the whip and willing to eat cantaloupes off the floor without their hands in submission to their partner.  The play’s gay couple is willing to go as far as to have the dominants boots cleaned by the submissive’s use of spit and their own hair.  Clearly this is not a play for the sexually reserved or squeamish.  For a few moments it feels like going back to the glory days of New York Times Square before Disney came and spoiled all the fun.

But is all of this sex play truly coming to us from antebellum south?– well, spoiler alert – it is not.

We are actually in 2018 in couples therapy as they are working through Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy, “a radical therapy designed to help black partners re-engage intimately with white partners from whom they no longer receive sexual pleasure.”  Slowly, the double meaning in Slave Play’s title emerges.

The set includes a full upstage wall of mirrors that, at times, is lit to reveal we, the audience, gawking at the characters as their lives are unravelling and their racist and sexual worlds are colliding. We are a part of the ride.  This play does intend that the audience is uncomfortable.  The play creates a space where race, power, fantasy and trauma can run wild.  Metaphorically it takes the whip out of the hands of the white folk and begins to wield it over them.