Review: SLAVE PLAY Considers and Probes

Jeremy O Harris's SLAVE PLAY, the much-discussed, incendiary play reopening the Mark Taper Forum, ends first with a bang then with barely a murmur. "Thank you, baby," a character says to a sexual partner during a situation where gratitude doesn't exactly feel like it should be the dominant emotion. "Thank you for listening." That final word is precisely what that those of us who make it through this dramatic battering should be taking away with us. Unquestionably, we all should listen...and talk...and occasionally laugh, and sometimes we should even be screaming until our lungs are on the brink of explosion. And we can be doing some of this to a Rihanna soundtrack.

Mostly we should talk, and Harris has given us plenty to mull over. SLAVE PLAY addresses questions related to race and power, certainly, and to the effects of racial interplay both on ourselves and on those whose legacies we may be carrying with us. Further discussions may ensue over sexuality, turning (as Harris's characters do) the carnal into the cerebral as we consider what kinds of bedroom behavior approach uncrossable lines. And there are psychological conundrums to unpack, the "processing" of human interactions which the playwright - clearly a very thoughtful man as well as a provocative storyteller - is using his play both to examine and to lambaste.

SLAVE PLAY confronts all of this, and if enough people pass through the doors of the Taper over the next four weeks to see what the buzz of the last few years has been about, then everybody will be talking a lot more loudly about Harris and his SLAVE PLAY than they will about Jamie New next door at the Ahmanson. There is no guarantee of that. There were plenty of seats on opening night, and for all of the play's critical accolades (including a record 12 Tony nominations), SLAVE PLAY is a tough, tough sit and not just because it demands audiences of all backgrounds to stare into a mirror and consider what we see.

This play is intended, at least on some level to be a comedy and - amazingly - it does have plenty of laughs even in the midst of intensely-induced queasiness. By way of example, in the play's opening vignette between Kaneisha (played by Antoinette Crowe-Legacy) a Black slave and the white overseer, Jim (Paul Alexander Nolan) in a shed on the MacGregor plantation in Virginia, a cantaloupe is tossed in the dirt. "Eat that watermelon there off the ground," the Slave Master orders. "That's a cantaloupe, Mista" returns Kaneisha. "No, it ain't. It's a watermelon." "Watermelons are green on the outside, red in the middle," explains Kaneisha. "Oh," Jim concedes. "The cantaloupe."

Jim is off on a lot of things in this encounter. And this is not a case of a Petruchio bullying Katherine into saying day is night; the man actually doesn't know his melons and is curiously willing to get schooled on a number of subjects. He also doesn't want to be called "Massa." We will learn more about why that is later.

From there, of course, things get considerably more intense, both between this pair and - in the mistress's chambers - between the plantation mistress Alana (Elizabeth Stahlmann) and the plantation's mulatto slave, Phillip (Jonathan Higginbotham). With the master out of house, Phillip is ordered first to play his fiddle and then service his mistress by taking the business end of an ebony dildo. In another room, Dustin (Devin Kawaoka), a white indentured servant is erotically taunted and seduced by the Black slave, Gary (Jakeem Dante Powell). In each of these scenes, things go from steamy to four-alarm, with lines of domination and submission being drawn and reconfigured, seemingly with every grunt, grope or thrust. Skirting a line between humor, eroticism and domination, director Robert O'Hara offers up these scenes with stomach-churning frankness. Finally, someone puts a stop to it all, and SLAVE PLAY'S first rug is pulled. What we have witnessed has been a master-slave interaction, but not exactly the dynamic we thought it was.

The play's second act, titled "processing," allows us to consider the scenes we have witnessed through the eyes of Teá (Chalia La Tour) and Patricia (Irene Sofia Lucio), a pair of scientists. Kaneisha, Jim, Alana, Phillip, Dustin and Gary get to "unpack" what they have been through within the context of a situation that many would consider monstrous. If I'm being vague about what's actually taking place, it's not necessarily because I believe that SLAVE PLAY will be ruined by revealing a narrative spoiler. There are more than a few hints along the way that the MacGregor plantation is not operating in the ways that they would in Antebellum days.

Regardless, even with most of the sex behind us, the middle section of SLAVE PLAY contains plenty of incendiary language. The discomfort level ratchets up and compounds during "processing" as characters come to terms with who they are, what they want and whether the person they thought they trusted is able to provide it.

Again, this is not for the faint of heart, nor is it intended to be. "You should not work to make the audience comfortable with what they are witnessing at all," Harris writes in his script notes, and O'Hara is every bit on the same page as the playwright. Plaudits certainly to the production's intimacy and fight director, Teniece Divya Johnson, whose work must have made a difficult assignment for this company that much easier to navigate.

Six characters can be a lot to flesh out in a limited period of time, and Harris seems to have more dramatic interest in some over others. Gary has a deeper backstory than, say, Dustin, whose principle dramatic function seems to be to deny his white-ness and get destroyed for doing so. Higginbotham deftly takes Phillip from being a simple-minded stud of few words to a man who is battling his own demons. And as welcome as the life raft of comic relief can be, the solicitous eggheaded-ness of La Tour and Lucio's characters comes across as jarring. Do we really care where they went to university or whether their work has been peer-reviewed?

Nolan walks a razor-fine line as Jim, a character marooned somewhere between being heroic and horrific. The actor - who created this role and his played it in both Broadway engagements - is neither looking for sympathy nor asking us to judge. His focus, ironically enough, is entirely upon the wants and needs of someone else. That would, of course, be Kaneisha, who Crowe-Legacy presents as a complicated amalgam of needs, scars, self-awareness and rage. Of all the journies of SLAVE PLAY, Kaneisha's is the most terrifying and Crowe-Legacy is the production's beating heart.

The initial run of SLAVE PLAY concluded its Broadway run in January of 2020, shortly before the onset of the pandemic. The Taper's production arrives directly from Broadway where a remounted version played 57 performances and featured most of these same cast members. Director Robert O'Hara, himself a talented playwright (his marvelous play BARBECUE, seen in 2016 at The Geffen Playhouse, feels like a thematic cousin to SLAVE PLAY), guides the proceedings with skill, finesse and, yes, plenty of squirms.

It wasn't so very long ago that Harris threatened to pull SLAVE PLAY from Center Theatre Group's programing in protest that the company's seasons across three venues did not contain enough women playwrights. That the playwright relented and allowed his play to go forward is a good thing. As long as SLAVE PLAY plays, discussions will happen and, one would hope, that listening will also occur.

SLAVE PLAY plays through March 13 at the Mark Taper Forum. (213) 972-4400, www.CenterTheatreGroup.org.

Photo L-R: Jonathan Higginbotham, Elizabeth Stahlmann, Chalia La Tour, Jakeem Dante Powell and Devin Kawaoka. Photo by Craig Schwartz.

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