HFC @ Tribeca '24: Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play. Also a Deconstruction of Performance. A Meta Cinematic Exercise. A Portrait of the Artist. A Guttural Scream.

Note: This review contains spoilers.

Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play. premiered last week at Tribeca Film Festival and is currently streaming on HBO Max. The following is absolutely full of spoilers. This does not in my opinion mar the experience of watching the film, but please take that into consideration if that’s something you care about. If you are not fortunate enough to be able to see the play, I highly recommend reading the text of the script, which is widely available. The film is intended to stand alone, however, so this is not a prerequisite. 

Notes on Notes on Style

As is somewhat common in a script for the stage, the script for Slave Play contains a brief note to the director, but also useful to the actors, indicating any special considerations or things to have in mind when staging the play. These notes generally refer to set design, blocking and movement, or the actors’ affect — like regional accents or specific types of line delivery that are not apparent in the script. Less commonly included is authorial intent. Analysis is a part of the rehearsal process, an intimate and integral act in establishing the actor-director bond and the creation of theatrical work. Playwright Jeremy O. Harris kept his notes sparse, but instead of giving simple directives, he offers broad statements which feel like discussion prompts.
The following has been excerpted out of order:

Everything in life is a performance.

This play is about shades, colors as much as it’s about race.

You should not work to make the audience comfortable with what they are witnessing. 

A staging of Slave Play should not be taken lightly; as a work about race and sex, it is vulnerable to mishandling. In these brief notes, Harris provides an intellectual path for the undertaking. He instructs those staging his play to consider shades of skin color in the casting process and their implications on the characters and the thesis of the project. He also provides a quote from I. H. Stallings’ Funk and the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures which traces a direct lineage in the philosophical dialectic of eros and work, from Plato to Sheila E, noting only the latter and her Black cohorts have tied eros and the erotic to practices of decolonization. The quote is presented without context or explanation, but it doesn’t need one; its relationship to the script will become abundantly clear. 

Harris’ notes on style are a vague but somehow very explicit guide to properly interacting with the text. But the majority of the playgoing public was not privy to these notes.

EXAMPLE:

In cell phone footage which went viral a couple years ago, a White woman stands up to speak during a Q&A session after a staging of Slave Play on Broadway. Indignant, she stands in a theater full of people shushing her and demanding she sit. She shouts at the playwright, stirred to anger at what she perceives to be an indictment of herself. “I’ve been marginalized my whole life,” she insists. She’s struggled economically, she’s lost custody of her children, she is subject to patriarchy. And despite this, she, a most noble creature, has “spent [her] whole life, every day, looking for a solution” to racism, though she never explains what that actually means. And here Harris is telling her through this play that she is the problem, that she, by mere dint of her skin color, is responsible for 400 years of oppression and violence and toxic narrative. This woman is tired of being made to feel this way, being told that she’s bad, that she is the problem by mean, vindictive Black people who only see her skin color. “What is the solution? You tell me,” she demands of Harris. He retains composure, plays this outburst for comedy even, defining metaphor as a device and suggesting that she see the play again.

The rest of the audience, held captive to this scene, reacts loudly and wildly. It is hard to discern, but most seem to pillory her. There are laughs and cheers. Many shout at her while she speaks. It recalls the interactive nature theater used to have. Of the crowds in Shakespeare’s Globe, hurling insults and objects, having the actors repeat parts they liked, with zero sense of a fourth wall.

She is, with beautiful obtuseness, displaying a core thesis of the play. That White people, however well intentioned they are, and however much they consider themselves to be the right kind of White person, to be “woke”— in quotes here because the term has jumped the shark through appropriation and lost its meaning— will center themselves and insist upon the primacy of their own emotions on the subject of race. That White defensiveness on the subject of race clouds the possibility for White people to reflect, and that in turn holds Black people hostage in a discourse they do not control, even while trying to express their own experiences and feelings.

It makes sense that Harris chose to open his documentary, Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play. with this and other footage of the impassioned and polarized responses to his play. The bulk of the film is a re-staging of the play in rehearsals, but it is also a contextualization of the play in its moment, and a deconstruction of process and meaning for the actors and Harris himself: a documentary about play within a documentary about reactions to the play, within a documentary about reactions to those reactions. 

Many playgoers and reviewers found Slave Play shocking, upsetting, insulting, an affront when it debuted on Broadway in 2019. Harris anticipated this in his notes in the script. Slave Play is meant to incite this type of reaction, because to actually confront the absolute depth of the chasm between the Black and White experience despite a shared epistemological understanding of history, to face the limits of human communication and empathy, is to be made uncomfortable. There is no other way to package it. The play is most explicit in this intention through its set design—the backdrop for the entire play is a giant mirror, tilted slightly down so that the audience is set en face with their own reflections. They cannot be passive watchers, they cannot escape themselves or the reactions of those around them. More specifically, White audience members are confronted with their own reactions, Black audience members are privy to White reactions, White audience members are in turn privy to Black reactions to their reactions. White people are probably checking in with the reactions of other White people. Black people probably are, too. Everyone is potentially being perceived all the time; it is impossible to remain comfortable.

Despite the expectation to elicit big reactions, something still stirred Harris to explore it further in a documentary. Part of it has to do with just how virulent some of the critical and public reaction to Slave Play was, but he also mentions the post-2020 iteration of performative wokeness among White people as a motivating factor. The play had its initial run before the murder of George Floyd and the feverish summer of 2020— of protests and shared reading lists and action items. It was a moment that seemed, especially in the context of a pandemic in full swing, like a possible sea change. Yet it fizzled just as quickly as people had normal lives to return to, leaving stacks of books unread and single black squares far back on Instagram grids. The residue of that summer still sticks to our landscape, and the farther removed we become from it, the more the naïveté becomes a joke. A lot of White people acquired a critical vocabulary, but a lot of people also wield that vocabulary, ironically(?), as a way to assert dominance on the subject of race. People picked up new and sometimes bizarre ways to signal their enlightenment, like buying board books for their infants on how to be an anti-racist. A lot of baroque gymnastics to evade criticism and turn nagging feelings of guilt into self-righteousness. A lot of “In this house…” signs in the yards of NIMBYs in cloistered White neighborhoods in blue cities. A lot of dialogue on race happening between White people and to the exclusion of Black people. It’s as if the country acted out Slave Play.

Nothing seems to have been gained from that summer, materially or discursively. We are still deeply entrenched in an insidious subconscious that fuels unease and prejudice. There is a sense in which the woman in the Q&A video is not wrong. She is just one individual, relatively powerless to heal society’s greatest wounds, and she struggles financially, and financial struggle is an insulating force. Her heart may be, in a misguided way, in the right place; she may earnestly wish things were different. But she has just sat through an entire play which plaintively asserts that all Black people asking White people to do is just shut up and listen (at least as a start). It is on one level baffling how someone can be presented with a work so clear and still miss the point. But no one likes being called out. Harris treats all of his characters with sensitivity. None of them are White nationalists, they are not open racists; that is not the psychology being examined. These are people who fancy themselves progressive, whose hearts are in the right place. People who desperately want to be good. It is a hard pill to swallow that it is possible to not mean to do any harm, but still do harm. Every White person may not be reflected in this play, but every White person can relate to something uncomfortable expressed in it. This woman in the video was far from the only person to embody the negative portrayal of its White characters while verbally refuting it. People were so incensed and reactionary to the thought of criticism that the controversy spilled out from the relatively insular theater world into the mainstream. Now playing in London, Slave Play remains divisive.

The Play

In its text, Slave Play is about three interracial couples engaging in a group interactive couples therapy which has them play out sexual fantasies as trope characters of the Antebellum South, a patented practice intended to help Black people regain sexual attraction to their White partners, lost due to epigenetic trauma. The tropes are embodied to a cartoonish, repulsive degree. The language is foul, as are the scenarios, but participants are not urged by the therapists to do or say anything in particular. They are left alone to see where the scenes take them. The romantic partners play, respectively, a slave and an overseer, a slave and a plantation owner’s wife, and an indentured servant and a slave in charge of him.

Seated with their therapists, the six participants conduct a post-mortem on their role play, dissecting each other’s actions, and generally tearing each other down. The discussion session is clearly set up to bring everyone in the room to a mutual understanding, but the resentment the partners have toward each other only becomes more deeply entrenched.

The Movie

Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play. is broken up into three acts which mirror the structure of the play: “Work,” “Process,” and “Exorcise.” At the start, Harris sits with a group of actors, about three times as large as the play calls for, and informs them and us that they will be rehearsing the film for the camera alone, as he forgot to document the rehearsal and production process of the play when it ran. This is fortuitous though, because had he done so, with everyone involved preoccupied with production, we would have possibly been left with a film far more straightforward. Harris is now approaching a documentary with the production and the reaction to it in hindsight. Without the burden of a set date and theatrical run, the actors, Harris, and even the film crew are free to explore the material in whatever meandering way they choose.

The meta-textual film is not new. There are many brilliant examples, from François Truffaut’s Day for Night, to Mostafa Derkaoui’s About Some Meaningless Events, to William Greaves’ Psycho Symbiotaxiplasm, all of which walk a line between fiction and documentary by taking a step back to show the filmmaking process, and in doing so reveal both the artifice of the art and the drama of creating it. The filmmakers become the story, but of course they in turn are also being filmed by a crew. Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play. also quite obviously has a kinship with behind-the-curtain documentaries like D. A. Pennebaker’s Original Cast Album: Company, which chronicles the recording of the album of the Broadway show and vividly captures the labor of creating art and the drama inherent in the act itself. 

A few things feel different watching the actors in Harris’ film. As stated in Slave Play’s Notes on Style, actors should be cast with great attention to their race and skin tone. This is obviously, on the surface, for the purpose of the lines in the play working, as reference to race and shade is constant. But the actors themselves also live with their races and shades. They are inevitably bringing themselves to their roles in a much more visceral way than a lot of other plays demand. 

They are also presented as eight archetypes–archetypes which are specific to their shades and races. The actors might not personally embody these archetypes, but they are doubtless aware of them and have almost certainly felt, in some way, the feelings expressed. They have also most likely been reduced to these archetypes by others– the characters they play may represent inaccurate identities they have struggled to shed. Juxtapositions of multiple takes of the same actor with overlaid audio illustrate the way they find their voices in the material, and it’s very interesting to watch. 

All of the White characters, in different ways, are people who push back on the idea of Whiteness. Jim, a White Brit, professes to be above accusations of racism by virtue of his deep love for his Black wife, Kaneisha, but there is an infantilization implicit in the way he treats her; there are some ways in which she is still an object. A loved object, but an object. There is a sense in which he knows best; he refuses to honor her wishes to play the role of the overseer to her slave because it violates his code of ethics and he deems it not good for her.

As a White woman, Alana feels aggrieved, entitled, righteously marginalized. She is blind to the idea that she could ever owe anybody anything or have anything to apologize for, as a marginalized person herself. But she also has no intention of causing any hurt to her younger mixed-race lover, Phillip [for the purposes of this discussion, a distinction is made between mixed-race and Black, because it is crucial to the play and the film], she is simply unaware of her selfishness and not inquisitive about his feelings or insecurities. She is unaware that Phillip feels like a fetish object for her, but that he also feels like their relationship makes him feel truly Black in a way he lacks in other spaces. She doesn’t know this because she doesn’t ask and she doesn’t pick up on his physical cues.

Dustin is White, but is perhaps racially ambiguous. He also might be someone whose ethnic background did not always fall under the umbrella of Whiteness— like Italian— but has since been absorbed into the categorization. He might also be the type of insufferable White person who loudly claims a just-significant-enough-to-seem-interesting amount of non-White heritage (usually Native American). Regardless, he is someone who moves through the world as White, but pushes back on the idea of privilege, no matter how demonstrably he benefits from it. He insists to his boyfriend, Gary, a dark Black man who does not have the privilege of mutability or self-definition, that he doesn’t see the world in Black and White, that he doesn’t see color. 

The therapists, Teá and Patricia, are both light skinned, but the former is mixed-race and the latter is described as light brown, though her race is not specified. Depending on casting their racial difference might be immediately apparent, or it might be imperceptible. It is possible that one or both of them struggle with the same insecurities as Phillip, though both have undoubtedly experienced racism and are coping by pathologizing their feelings and keeping them at an academic remove.

All of these are very real dynamics the actors, especially the non-White ones, have experienced or witnessed in some form. In fact, to drive the meaning of this exercise home, a rehearsal assistant literally holds a mirror up to the actors as they read their lines. And so this is not just any normal exercise, it becomes a meta-therapy session mirroring the one in the play. 

It is an interesting choice that the play within the film has been over-cast, with 2-4 actors for each role. The reading is presented chronologically with interchanging casts as it progresses, and the effect is to both reify and reject the idea of archetype. All these actors look like each other, they all fulfill their archetype in one way, but as different people they give different line readings and their portrayals are of fully different people. Both Kaneishas are perfectly cast and perform the role impeccably, but they are very different Kaneishas. 

Some of the actors struggle with their lines. One actress playing Alana must be coached and given permission to say some racial epithets. It’s not a matter of just saying something unsavory, it’s a matter of being a White person, looking into the eyes of a Black person, and gleefully owning all which their race has wrought. In that moment the veneer of a character feels very thin. 

But watching these actors pull off this uncomfortable material is really funny. The dialogue is over the top and the scenarios are ridiculous. In the theater, the film elicited constant laughter. It’s a brilliant way into the material— a deathly serious play wouldn’t have gotten the same buzz because the message would be more expected and frankly fewer people would have gone to see it. This humor permeates the entire film. 

“Process” details Harris’ multitudinous influences and how the play came to be. Most notable is an infographic depicting the most popular porn search terms in the US by state. “Lesbian,” “Step-mom,” “Teen.” Most popular in the entire block of the South and also New York: Ebony. Not all of the backlash to the play came from White people clutching their pearls; there were many Black people who were offended at the sexual degradation the Black characters are subjected to. They felt they were watching Black people debase themselves for shock value. And it is shocking, and it is difficult to watch, but the fetishization of Black people by White people is clearly a vestige of slavery that lingers. 

All of the Black characters in Slave Play are degraded in their Antebellum scenarios, but Kaneisha is the only one asking for it, and this is perhaps the most vexing facet of the whole play. How can this possibly be something from which she will derive pleasure? Why should we want this for her? For Kaneisha, what she wants is S&M, and she wants a situation where she is in control, even if she’s in the submissive role. One gets the sense that she is enjoying the illicit nature of it, having fun even, and could climax if Jim played along. But she’s also clearly in the power position—she may be submissive in the explicit sense, but implicitly she is the one forcing Jim to bend to her will. Sex always involves a power dynamic and it is impossible to compartmentalize sex in the context of an interracial relationship. She is Black and he is White and no matter how much they love each other they can’t escape the fact that they live their lives on unequal terms. One gets the sense that Kaneisha wants Jim to be uncomfortable, that she wants him to embody the role of the overseer and say vile racist things precisely because he doesn’t want to, because he sees himself as exempt from a history that she can never shake.

Harris states that his intent with Slave Play was to illuminate all the ways in which slavery still lives with us. In its caricatures and romanticized portrayals that until relatively recently were the standard media portrayal. Even after the trope of the happy slave became widely viewed as abhorrent (later than you think) and it became more widely accepted (though not as widely as you think) that the violent horrors of slavery should be depicted with brutal honesty, it is still often packaged, intentionally or not, in a way that lets White spectators exempt themselves from it. It is historicized, in the same way as Jim Crow, as something that is over, that has been overcome. One is able to view the White characters from a remove and say, “Look how bad they were back then.” It leaves room to posit how one might have been a good White person had they been around then. “I am not that overseer, I am not that person holding the whip. I am not the worst of the worst, that kind of venom is not relatable. Surely, I can say, from the safety of the future, that my home would have been a stop on the Underground Railroad. I would have been an abolitionist. In a world so unjust, I would have burned it all down.” Works meant to fell the gates of empathy become unintentional vehicles for White savior fantasy.

Vortex of the Artist

A Play. Not a Movie. So why a movie? This is the central question of the film. Harris gives us a few answers. After so much discussion and so much misinterpretation, he wants to fix the play as a historical object. A play can be endlessly reinterpreted by new directors and actors, and it is by its nature interactive and ephemeral. Even with the same director and cast, each performance will be different. In creating a film, he is creating a static piece that must be accepted and digested as it is. By inserting himself and being quite transparent about his views, he is nipping interpretation in the bud. It is a catharsis, a chance to say, “This is what you were supposed to learn. Hear it from me. I am the authority on my work.”

But this does not mean he wants to close the book and shelve the play. Far from it. Harris is emphatic that Slave Play is a play, not a movie. It’s in the title. He rejected many offers to turn the material into a narrative film, as he felt the form would significantly change the meaning of the work. A film is passive, a film can be turned off, a film can be watched alone, a film can’t hold up a literal mirror to its audience. And something about placing the narrative of the play into a film would have given it the historical remove of so much other work on slavery, despite the freshness of the material. 

Part of the aim of the film also seems to be to present Harris as the main character of his work. It can be controversial in the arts - visual, literary, dramatic, cinematic - for the creator to interject their own voice like this. On the one hand, understanding the creator’s vision contextualizes and enhances the experience of the piece, however there is a school of thought that a work should stand alone. It’s not just rejection of the auteur theory, it’s about the artist as a public figure creeping into their work. But the whole point of Harris’ grander creative MO is to loudly interject his opinion, and his persona has become a part of his work. Harris acknowledges this loopy relationship of the artist to their work as he sits with his editor to cut together the film we are currently watching, a final section of the film which turns its onion skin narrative structure into a visual gag and is also just a really funny depiction of the maddening process of editing a film. 

Exorcism

Slave Play is an ensemble piece and lines are split fairly evenly, but Kaneisha is unequivocally the protagonist. And in many ways the relationship between Harris, the director, and the actress playing Kaneisha is the most intimate of all. Harris leaves a lot of room in the script for director and actors to work as individuals and find their own moments, but he gives Kaneisha a special gift.

The participants in Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy are all there under the pretense that the deficiency belongs to the Black partners. That they suffer from Racialized Inhibiting Disorder. They are the ones who are preoccupied with history, they are the ones who struggle with their identities. At the play’s end, Jim comes to Kaneisha in their bedroom with his tail between his legs. She has just ended the therapy session in an outburst of epiphany— there is nothing wrong with her or any of the other Black people, it is the virus of Whiteness that has infected everyone. It is a jarring enough speech that Jim finally really listens to her, and he comes around to give her what she wants, sexually. But there is a moment of force when the fantasy becomes too real and she pushes him off. 

In this moment the script gives a gift to the actress: to pause for a moment, take in the scene, the character, the play, herself, her race, her history, her life, all of the microaggressions and overt aggressions, the assumptions and misunderstandings, the strangers who have sized her up, the betrayals, her sexual past, her insecurities, her relationship to her body, her friendships, her relationships, her loneliness, her frustration, her sadness, and then… to do whatever she feels is right in that moment. For both Kaneishas in the film, it’s a primal, blood curdling scream. A frustrated catharsis, a call into the void. It’s an act that, for at least a moment, forces everyone to just shut up. In her final lines and actions, it is Kaneisha who determines whether the play is a comedy or a tragedy. 

It is possible to come away from the play without any feelings of vindication or resolution. But it would be facile to take it as a pessimistic work. It is not a proscription against interracial relationships, romantic or otherwise. The point is to be illustrative, not instructive. The audience must take it from there on their own. Harris is explicit in his wild optimism about the power of theater as a form. And it is impossible to sit in the theater for Slave Play and not be moved to reflection, even if one bristles against what that reveals. And Interactive Theatre Spectator Therapy is a means of comfort for some even if it doesn't spur growth in everyone. Black people got to see this play with other Black people and feel affirmed, affirmed in their experiences and feelings but also in the foolishness of White people, and got to feel that in the formal, usually White institution of a Broadway theater. In the video of the White woman’s outburst at the Q&A, amid the cackles and jeers and the community of the theater, the Black woman recording the video laughs and says, “This is the best day of my life.”

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