Slave
Play—a Broadway remounting of the controversial
production that opened at New York
Theatre Workshop last season—seems suited to a review
in brief because its creative team and producers don’t
want reviewers to spoil the big reveal that happens halfway through.
Let’s just say then that Jeremy O. Harris has written a dark
comedy in which you spend the first half of the play believing you’re in one particular storytelling universe,
one that seems outrageously satirical—sensing, even so, that something about it
is a bit off, but not being able to
quite define it—only to find that you’re in another
storytelling universe altogether, also satirical, that contains the first and gives it context. The subject being explored
in both is how-or-whether inter-racial sexuality brings social and world
history into the bedroom, along with desire.
It’s a fairly gutsy premise within a
fairly gutsy play, and without being at all the same, it evoked for me nothing
so much as Mel Brooks’ 1974 satire of Westerns (and race relations) Blazing Saddles, in the sense that you
couldn’t possibly get away with its brand of racial irreverence today, without
running afoul of WOKE; and that you probably
couldn’t possibly have gotten away with Slave
Play’s racial irreverence in the 70s, without running afoul of moral
outrage. And for the most part, director Robert
O’Hara and his courageous and talented cast of eight achieve the precarious
balance between outrageous circumstance and human verisimilitude to pull it
off.
As to what the play actually has to
say…I’m not so sure that a critic’s individual response is even relevant,
because the point of the exercise (in several senses of the word) is to examine
one’s own level of social-racial-sexual awareness by way of enforced exposure
to extremity. How I may feel about this ”sensibility test” is less important
than whether it’s worth your experiencing and (possibly) debating thereafter;
and that answer is a decided yes.
Go to David Spencer's Profile
Return to Home Page