Theater Review: An Uneven "Daddy" Explores Race and Sexuality

Daddy: A Melodrama

Written by Jeremy O. Harris

Directed by Danya Taymor

Starring Ronald Peet, Charlayned Woodward, and Alan Cumming

The New Group and Vineyard Theater

Pershing Square Center, Manhattan

March 31, 2019

Jeremy O. Harris is a young black California-born playwright recently lauded for The Slave Play (I had mixed feelings about it) and its often-shocking exploration of black-white sexuality and relationships. He’s now commissioned to produce new plays both the Lincoln Center Theater and Playwright’s Horizon, all while finishing his degree at the Yale School of Drama—this is clearly a man on the move. So it was interesting to see his earlier play Daddy, written in 2015 (and the play that got him into Yale) but premiering only now. The play had interesting moments and received excellent performances, but seemed (as it was) the work of a very young playwright who had not yet figured out how to create a convincing dramatic arc.

Harris’ more recent The Slave Play used a first act shock to make its point…we witnessed cruel and explicit sexual couplings between “antebellum” mixed race couples, which turned out to be therapy role plays for troubled contemporary married couples. The play was intentionally asymmetric, following its steamy first act with an angry, talky group therapy session in which much class and racial resentment is expressed. This older play Daddy also relies on first act shock, but in a different way. A young black artist Franklin (Ronald Peet) is seduced by a rich white art patron (a deliciously creepy Alan Cumming) and shacks up with the older man in an exquisite Hollywood Hills mansion, complete with a swimming pool crossing the width of the stage (first row patrons got wet). The first act gets in our face with lots of full-frontal nudity, naked swimming, and explicit sex talk—I suspect the author was trying to give the audience another early electric shock to awaken them from their comfortable world views. Three other characters soon appear, two millennial friends and the artist’s very religious mother (the dynamic Charlayne Woodward). They act as sort of a conscience for Franklin, worried that he has abandoned his artistic integrity to be a kept man. In addition, four black gospel singers act as an actual Greek chorus throughout the play, singing and commenting in different musical styles, and often just watching (judging) the lurid proceedings. This is a very creative setup for an examination of how the artist is fulfilling his gay identity, yet apparently abandoning his black heritage (as represented by mom and the gospel singers). A sustained metaphor comes when mom recognizes that the “art” that is selling so well to rich white people in Beverly Hills are actually the primitive rag “coon babies” that her son had been making as a child. She challenges him—is this really art? Is he just using black tradition to defraud rich white people? Is his white “sugar daddy” the best way for him to grow as a man? To its credit, the play defies easy stereotypes. For example, mom does not seem to have issues with her son’s gayness, just his life decisions.

So far, so good. The problem with the play is that once these initial characters and themes are introduced and the metaphors established, the rest of the three acts play out without much interesting development. The relationship of Franklin and his daddy does not really progress much. Mom expresses lots of anger and appropriate concern for her son, but never evolves much, either. I kept waiting for the Gospel Choir to play a more prominent role, like a Greek chorus might, damning or praising from on high. But they mostly moved about the stage bringing on props, and were underused. The small cloth dolls that Franklin initially sells in galleries are replaced by creepy life-sized black and white floppy dolls, providing the opportunity for lots of miming of sex, bondage, and cruelty—a rather cheap effect that never plays out as chillingly as it could have. The splashing and frolicking in the pool was fun, but often distracted from the dialogue. Like many young playwrights, I think Mr. Harris had lots of ideas, but an imperfect sense of structure and pacing. So the play was interesting, but not quite good. About what you would expect from a talented, creative grad school applicant. Mr. Harris is still in his 20’s, and with the exception of Eugene O’Neill, most of the modern greats only really produced masterworks in their fourth decade. So stay tuned.

There was a meta-moment. At one point in the play, Franklin’s mom scathingly critiques his debut gallery show as a bunch of entitled white people fawning over the child-like “coon babies” and persuading themselves that this was 1. art and 2. a good way of expiating their white guilt (sadly, another idea that did not get well developed). I looked around the 150-seat theater and saw exactly three black attendees. So there we were in midtown Manhattan--a bunch of wealthy white patrons seeing an under-developed audition play by a black writer who is the latest NYC critical darling.  I wonder if the playwright sensed this irony?