Theater Review: An uneven The Slave Play plumbs raw interracial sexual emotion

The Slave Play

By Jeremy O. Harris

Directed by Robert O’Hara

New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan

January 6, 2019

This new play about race relations relies on shock effect to make its main point. Spoiler: I will now divulge the shock, which is the main thing to talk about here. The play opens with three lurid sexual couplings, each a mixed-race couple in the antebellum South. A “big house” lady rapes a dignified articulate handsome black butler. A white male share cropper is seduced by black male over-slave. And a randy white overseer rapes a beautiful black woman slave. This extended prelude is done with lurid lighting, (mostly) convincing southern accents, and partial nudity. And a dildo. At the end of this orgy (oddly ended by one guy calling out “Starbucks”) all the characters are summoned to the “big house”, where part two of the play commences.

 It turns out this was all a role-playing exercise for some contemporary mixed-race couples (two straight, one gay) having marital and or sexual difficulties. Two Yale Psychology students are doing a thesis experiment to see if “antebellum sex therapy” can help them overcome their difficulties. During the remainder of the play the two graduate students earnestly and often uncomfortably try to facilitate a group debriefing of the three couples to see what they learned or gained from the exercise. Each couple has its turn in explicating their difficulties, and each character reveals his/her response to the exercise. The most common theme is that the black members of the couples feel disempowered or taken for granted, despite the white members’ professed affection for/respect for/attraction to them, and dspite their professed liberal attitudes towards black empowerment. A recurring theme is that the black partners feel that their white counterpart uses them as either a sexual fetish or a proof of their openness and tolerance, and that the couple is not truly equal. On the other hand, the white members feel they are truly devoted to their partners but face overt or suppressed resentment for behaviors they either did not do or did not intend. The playwright does a good job at not agreeing with one or the other one of these views—perhaps both are right. Both emotions seemed like plausible challenges for such couples in the current heated environment we live in, where black people are expressing the anger and resentment built up over the years. It was an interesting idea to use mixed-race couples therapy as a microscope into these emotions, and the dialogue was mostly convincing, even if the insecurity of the researchers when they faced real human emotion in their subjects was a bit distracting and unnecessary.

The play ultimately left only a moderate impression on me. The opening sexuality was intended to shock the audience into awareness (“woke-ness”) that would make us receptive to the talky therapy that followed, and make us see the link between white-black repression then and now. But I thought the opening antebellum scenes were just a bit too familiar from past movies (Mandingo, Django Unchained) to really shock, and the talk therapy seemed too familiar from similar therapy-on-stage dramas. The set of the group therapy session featured a now-cliché device of mirrors behind the players, forcing the audience to see itself in the drama. This device was stunning the first time I saw it at the Bayreuth Wagner festival at the end of Parsifal in 2010 (the large mirror was rolled out for dramatic effect at the end of the opera). But here, having it onstage for the whole play seemed a bit much. The acting was largely convincing but went over the top into melodrama at times. The best actor was Teyonah Parris (If Beale Street Could Talk) as the angry black slave and resentful partner of an emotionally repressed British white man. By the way, he was the one who called out the trigger word “Starbucks” to prematurely end the antebellum role play, causing his wife to resent him deeply for controlling the experience and from preventing her from fully experiencing the exercise’s full impact. Ms. Parris demonstrated wide emotional range, initially reluctant to share anything with the group, but finally displaying the rawest, most genuine feelings. Hers was the one moment when I felt the anger of the modern black person most acutely.

I think this play was an interesting, if slightly gimmicky inspiration for conveying the emotions of a complex modern social problem in a novel way. It was very refreshing to see a playwright willing to shock us rather than creating a “safe space”. Unfortunately the execution of the inspiration was middling, both in dialogue and production.