Slave Play at the Taper

American History in Black and White

By Steven Leigh Morris

Stage Raw’s first weekly podcast, Stages of Our City, is now available. It featuring Julyza Commodore and Terry Morgan, with their views on Slave Play (Mark Taper Forum), Umoja (Black Creators Collective at the Will Agee Theatre in Inglewood), Power of Sail (Geffen Playhouse), and How We Got On (Sacred Fools).  

L-R: Antoinette Crowe-Legacy and Paul Alexander Nolan. Photo by Craig Schwartz

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The play is a comet that rattles and prattles along its trajectory, unsure of whether it wishes to be regarded as an object of insight, of provocation, of titillation or of mystification.

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Jeremy O. Harris’s burlesque-drama, Slave Play, wistfully staged by Robert O’Hara with a charismatic ensemble, opened at the Mark Taper Forum in the current wake of the pandemic and in an era of racial reckoning. Though it streaks across the theatrical firmament like a comet, its tail is more luminous than the substance of the object itself — an object that rattles and prattles along its trajectory, unsure of whether it wishes to be regarded as an object of insight, of provocation, of titillation or of mystification. It can be seen as any or all of those descriptions. Such ambiguity is not necessarily a virtue.

Yet that tail shines bright with theatrical ancestors both recent and distant: Suzan-Lori Parks’s White Noise (which was being performed at the New York Public Theater before Covid struck it down), was predicated in large part on an arrangement between two male childhood friends, one white, one Black. The Black man, an insomniac, was brutalized by police for the crime of walking while Black late at night in his own wealthy neighborhood. Partly in response to that trauma, he pressures his reluctant white friend to “hire” him as a slave for a few months, for a substantial sum of money, in order that both men come to terms with that dynamic. That dynamic, and that role playing, is clearly at work in Slave Play.

After premiering at Crossroads Theatre Company in New Jersey, George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum later appeared on this same Mark Taper Forum stage in 1988. Like Slave Play, it contains a series of burlesque vignettes that traverse the African-American experience, from the Middle Passage to evolving musical styles to evolving hair styles. Near the start of the play, a flight attendant advises passengers over the P.A. system to be sure to “fasten their shackles.”

All of these plays speak through a blend of satire and farce – the difference being that Parks and Wolfe are poets. And that’s slightly different from Harris, whose words – and the contexts he places them in – reveal craft and seduction but only shards of transcendence. The Colored Museum and White Noise contain rage and humanity. Slave Play substitutes much of that humanity for mere indignation by conflating grievance with abuse. As comets go, it’s a minor one.  

Further back in the 20^th century resides Jean Genet’s The Balcony, set in a brothel during a revolution, where powerful figures act out fetishes of being degraded by sadists who, in life, have little power and, literally, lust for it. Later, back on the streets, the powerful tuck their sub fetishes back into their trousers in order to put down the revolution that threatens them.

All of the above are, in “in play” through the course of Slave Play. Rather than a brothel, Harris’s play is set in a group therapy session – same thing really – administered by a Black and white female couple (Chalia La Tour and Irene Sofia Lucio) – “researchers” at Yale. This provides a setting for the cloying jargon and the administrators’ dishonest motives that’s as much a part of O’Harris’s satire as everything else. I recognized the humor yet was unable to laugh with it, perhaps because the administrators were so imperiously self-involved and painfully familiar as cartoons.

They literally preside over three other Black-white couples, all suffering from sexual dysfunction — two hetero and one gay — by encouraging them to act out their psycho-sexual fetishes.

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

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Their real life complaints – believable causes for an inter-personal break-up — serve as a flimsy metaphor for the depths of resentment, bigotry and hatred that fuel race riots. And yet, that’s the implication.

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In order to get her juices flowing, white Alana (Elizabeth Stahlmann) needs to imagine her partner Phillip (Jonathan Higginbotham) – a pale-skinned Black man —  as a servant on the plantation who she can sodomize with a super-sized black dildo that’s a legacy gift from her own grandmother. And he “sort of” enjoys it. O’Hara stages the scene – on a Victorian bed set on a green Astro-turf carpet against the backdrop of floor-to-ceiling mirrors in which characters and audience see themselves (set by Clint Ramos) – in the strategically overblown style of a meticulously choreographed melodrama. This invites laughter and prurience to swim side-by-side, with the former being a rationalizing acknowledgement of the latter. Meanwhile Phillip’s identity crisis stems from his failure to be recognized (or to understand himself) as either white or Black; rather, an oddity — not good for the libido.

Dustin (Devin Kawaoka), an actor, resents living in Harlem with his Black partner, Gary (Jakeem Dante Powell), because it takes him such a long time to get to mid-town auditions. Poor guy. There are many legitimate causes of white indignation – including, as Suzan-Lori Parks writes so well — swaths of Caucasian poverty across the country aggravated by cultural erasure, but this ain’t one of them. In their fetish, Dustin hauls bails of cotton onto a cart, collapsing in exhaustion, under the watchful eye of Gary as plantation overseer, until they both wind up almost naked with Dustin licking Gary’s boots. This fetish hews as closely as any of them to Genet, though their real life complaints – believable causes for an inter-personal break-up — serve as a flimsy metaphor for the depths of resentment, bigotry and hatred that fuel race riots. And yet, that’s the implication. Gary’s 21^st century complaint is that he’s being used as a Black token for his partner’s liberalism rather than being actually respected for who he is. Unlike on the streets of Charlottesville, or in the Black Wall Street district of Tulsa, Oklahoma over a century ago, there is resentment but no malice between these two men. It’s the malice that turns indignation into abuse. One can certainly lead to another, but that’s simply not on this stage, with these particular people.

The most telling example of this conflation lies in the story of Kaneisha (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy) – a Black writer who, until late in the play, struggles to articulate her feelings – and her white, English husband James (Paul Alexander Nolan), who understandably finds the group therapy session “insane.” In their fetish – her fetish, he’s a very reluctant participant – he’s cast as a whip-wielding plantation overseer who degrades the female slave, while she gleefully indulges in and mocks her own degradation. She twerks in her hoop dress, she squeals in a put-on infant voice in order to arouse him further. The scene is as brilliant as it is appalling, largely because of the rich dynamics in Crowe-Legacy’s performance. The truth lies less with the words, or even with the situation, as with the shining glint in Crowe-Legacy’s eye. That glint carries so many meanings – Kaneisha’s mockery of her abject station, of her overseer and, by extension, of her husband. And yet, and yet . . . the degradation is what she covets. Why?

She comes to the realization that her husband, who calls her his “queen” (eye-roll from her), not only has but is the same virus that the Europeans brought to the American continent before they unwittingly (through diseases they didn’t realize they possessed), decimated hundreds of thousands of people who resided in the Americas before them. As she now lies with him in their bed, she sees a virus, equating him, personally, with the legacy of people sharing his skin color who died centuries before he was born. He may be a flawed, arrogant sot – he is English, after all – but there is no malice on his part. Rather, he vomits into their bed during their sado-masochistic role play because he finds his theatrical abuse of the woman he cherishes to be so viscerally disgusting. Even as a writer, she doesn’t articulate any blame against a system of abuse that’s been woven into the very structures of our society and culture, into law enforcement, the voting system, the judicial system. No. She blames him personally for a history whose injustice he personally abhors. The play’s closing image is her continuing to crave degradation, because of history? Because of him. She has resolutely conflated the two, though the play leaves its own take on Kaneisha lazily ambivalent.

So Gary can’t love a white man who shows him insufficient respect. Kaneisha can’t love a white man who adores her relentlessly, or at least while he adores her. And Alana’s control-freak fetish with her terribly confused Black husband doesn’t lead to much help for either of them.

I like the idea in this play, as in its predecessors, that we are not as we appear, which is very much tied to the premise of theater itself — even in a psycho drama about psychodrama such as this. Revelations stemming from pretending to be who we’re not, forge eternal truths. That’s really all there is to theater, and this is one of Slave Play’s virtues.

That said, I’m mystified by the adoring reception this play received in New York, and also comforted that the play has been met with more skepticism in Los Angeles. Perhaps it’s a facile sentiment, but it makes me feel as though I’m at home here.

SLAVE PLAY | Mark Taper Forum, 135 Grand Ave., dwntwn. | Tues.-Sat., 8 pm; Sat., 2:30 pm; Sun., 1 & 6:30 pm | Through March 13. https://ctgla.org

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