As 'Slave Play' moves to Broadway, revisit our profile of playwright Jeremy O. Harris
Jeremy O. Harris. Photo: Mamadi Doumbouya In the winter of 2015, the playwright Jeremy O. Harris decided to write Slave Play as a bit of a dare. He was at a holiday party in Prospect Heights, where he got into a heated debate with a group of writers about “erotics, desire, and who gets to own fantasy.” One of them, a straight white guy, said he had recently enjoyed enacting a rape fantasy with a partner. Feeling his Socratic self, Harris decided to troll him.
From there, Slave Play became a critical hit that went beyond the bubble of the downtown theater world, turning into a conversational flash point in cultural circles. During the final weekend of its run in January, Madonna, Whoopi Goldberg, Anna Wintour, Stephen Sondheim, and Jake Gyllenhaal were among the attendees.
“I was supposed to write in the car, and you kept me up doing your job, so I’m going to keep you up doing mine,” Harris tells me. He stretches out on the bed with his MacBook on his stomach, millennial-pink Acne beanie on his head, and a one-and-a-half-liter bottle of Evian within reach as he queues up some songs — serpentwithfeet, the soundtrack to BPM, and Frank Ocean — to get him on the right wavelength for the work.
“I was always like, ‘I want to make a play that does not pretend as soon as you leave out of here, you aren’t going to an incognito window on your phone and looking up ‘ebony porn,’ because you are,” Harris says. “They just delete the history, or they don’t. For me, that is a metaphor for race relations writ large in our country: Our understanding of history is a constant erasing of our incognito window.
I would learn over the course of 28 hours that this is just how Jeremy O. Harris operates. His mind is bright like quicksilver; he switches constantly between topics, tasks, and worlds; it’s part of what has allowed him to traverse the various spheres of theater, art, fashion, academia, social media, and criticism.
As the pages print, Harris orders us egg sandwiches and iced coffee on Snackpass to pick up on our way, while Foley tells me about a play Harris put on during his first year at Yale, called Water Sports; or insignificant white boys, that made him an enfant terrible. The Yale School of Drama never officially sanctioned the production, mainly because of regulations about which students can perform in official plays.
Harris grabs the pages, still warm from the printer, and we’re off again, following the golden lining of his coat fluttering in the wind. He shopped the pilot around, too, but agents suggested that he turn it into a short film first, which would require figuring out how to raise money and shoot it. “I decided to just not,” says Harris. “Because one of the options I heard was you could just write a play and have that produced. I was like, you know what, fuck TV, fuck movies. I just wanna write plays.”
In “Daddy,” a young, ascendant black artist named Franklin gets into a relationship with an older, wealthier white art collector Andre — a ne’er-do-well with little taste but a lot of money. Andre is attracted to Franklin’s eye, his youth and talent and blackness; he seems, at first, like another piece for his collection. Franklin wants a father figure, and over three acts, he regresses into baby talk. His mother, Zora , arrives; a struggle ensues.
At the gala, Harris exerts a gravitational pull around him as we walk through the old Bowery Savings Bank building, and he is stopped at various points by donors, trustees, and fellow theater-makers. Slave Play is mentioned throughout the ceremonies, including by Kelly Fowler Hunter, the president of the board of trustees, who calls it “furiously entertaining.
The audience, concentric pods of suits and blowouts, titters along. The moment reminds me of a conversation we had on the drive up to New Haven almost 24 hours prior when I’d asked him when he learned to manipulate the gaze and walk through the world unconstrained. I wanted to understand how he did that, so that maybe I could learn how to do it myself.
“I have no idea,” he replies as we exit. A small contingent breaks off to go around the block to Tropical 128 for an after-party, where Harris alternates Patrón on the rocks with American Spirits outside.
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