Slave Play (2024); Noël Coward Theatre, London
By Chris Gismondi
When I first heard about Slave Play, I couldn’t believe it existed. A queer black playwright, Jeremey O. Harris wrote a theatre piece about three inter-racial couples doing sexual plantation role play? Whoa! The play debuted off Broadway in 2018, then on Broadway in 2019. It received a record twelve Tony nominations for a non-musical and even spawned an HBO documentary Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play (2024). To say that this work of theatre has been controversial is an understatement. Some denounced the “black out” nights where only black-identified audience members were invited so discussions around racism, sexuality, and relationships could take place away from intrusive white onlookers. Other commentators recoiled at the very premise of the play, sparking a petition to shut it down. When a friend of mine who studies drama informed me that it was coming to London’s West End, we bought tickets. Full disclosure: I am a queer, Canadian white guy living in the UK and I took the (economy) coach from Cardiff to London to see it for myself. My deep interest in the topic comes from my own PhD research on Transatlantic Slavery and the knowledge of how profoundly problematic and violent experiences of sex were for the enslaved.
This production featured many of the principal cast and crew, as well as Olivia Washington and Game of Throne’s Kit Harrington in the leading roles. As I stood in line for the theatre, stickers were put over the cameras of audience members’ phones. I knew we were in for something unique.
The play opens with a pastoral scene of a southern plantation. The stage is completely lined with mirrors, reflecting the audience back on itself. A black woman named Kaneisha enters the stage in a tattered dress and headwrap, sweeping. Eventually she dances and twerks to a distorted version of Rihanna’s dancehall song Work (2016). A white man joins her on stage with a whip on his hip. Jim the overseer is infatuated by Kaneisha’s dancing. She flirts with him, inviting him to call her a “nasty negress”. He is reluctant, distancing himself from the whites in the Big House because he’s a labouring man more akin to the enslaved black folks than the white, aristocratic plantation master. They begin to have sex.
A second couple emerges, Alana is a white mistress in a huge frilly gown and her mixed-race man servant Phillip is dressed in livery, cheerfully smiling and complying with her requests. She asks him to play the violin for her, but not Beethoven, she wants to hear soulful “Negro music” on the fiddle. She is in heat and tears away her hoop skirts to reveal black thigh high boots and latex shorts. She talks about the “black bucks” of the plantation and shows him a family heirloom passed between the women in her family to pleasure themselves. A black phallic dildo. She wants to penetrate him with it and he agrees to it.
A third scene emerges with a white indentured labourer in rags hauling bales of cotton under the watchful eye of an enslaved black person. The bound white man, Dustin, is struggling as Gary tasked with managing him, threatens and degrades him as the “lowest form of white.” They confront one another standing face to face, intimately close. They wrestle, clothes being torn off to black briefs. The enslaved man overseeing the white indentured labourer gets him to lick his boot. He quivers with his climax before bursting into tears. Dustin jumps up trying to console Gary, but he cannot. The other couples and sex scenes re-emerge on stage. Jim and Kaneisha are still having sex, she addresses him as “massa Jim”. She again wants to be called a “nasty negress” mid-coitus, but he refuses before yelling the safe word “Starbucks” in his natural British accent. At which time two female observers appear and call off the experiment, “let’s meet back in the Big House in fifteen.” The facade of the “slave play” broken, these women are revealed as therapists and they have been observing contemporary couples role playing sex-scenes within the setting of slavery.
Act two begins with the two women, one white woman and one black, Patricia and Teá. They are the fourth couple, but they are also therapists leading a session with the characters as they re-emerge on stage in contemporary dress to analyze their experience in Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy; a tool that they designed to help black partners unsatisfied in inter-racial relationships. They propose this as a cure for black participants inability to feel pleasure, or anhedonia as a racial trauma. That “Racializing Inhibiting Disorder” manifests as anxiety, obsessive compulsion, with musical fixation. The session is led by Patrica and Teá as well intentioned, progressive therapists, who still fumble spectacularly.
The couples process their feelings of desire, undesirability, and racism as a group on folding chairs set up in a semi-circle facing the audience. As the discussion unfolds, it is revealed that Alena and Philip met in a “cuck fantasy,” whereby Alena’s white husband would watch Phillip have sex with her. A breakthrough for Phillip comes when he realizes that as a mixed-race man, he is not ambivalent to how others see his blackness, even if he has not always wanted to embrace or identify with it. Gary and Dustin fight about how race has manifested itself in their relationship with Phillip identifying as an undescribed “not white,” who won’t “dignify” Gary’s rebuttals as they argue. Dustin has dismissed Gary’s thoughts and feelings. Gary retorts that he enjoyed the power in the role play too much (that he has felt like a tool by which others exoticize their whiteness by proximity) but he realizes he’s the “prize” that Dustin has taken for granted.
Meanwhile, Kaneisha and Jim process their relationship too. Kaneisha, although a writer and educated black woman, fails to find the words to describe her frustration that Jim would not do as she asked. That is, he would not identify his lineage in this whiteness during their sex play. She is disturbed that he re-claimed the balance of power by using the safe word. She eventually reveals that, although his Britishness was exotic to her, something different than American masculinity, he is the worst type of white, perhaps the root of colonialism and plundering. He is a “virus,” and he demonstrates an inability to acknowledge his privilege.
He detaches himself from a violent history of whiteness as they argue and sit in the group couple’s therapy. The dialogue heavy scene has each couple in confrontation. Jim is oblivious to race in their lives replying to Kaneisha simply “you’re my queen,” to which I can hear audience members scoff at his racial erasure. He admits he was reluctant to participate in the role play, but Kaneisha wanted him to acknowledge his privilege and its connection to his race.
In act three, Kaniesha is alone on stage, packing her belongings in her bedroom. Jim enters, pleading to save their relationship. In return, she pleads for him to listen to her. She reflects on their relationship, her loss of pleasure, and that her familial or ancestral elders see her with a “demon”. She wanted to participate in the role play to confront these issues. Jim, maybe desperate to save their relationship, maybe finally understanding the role he was asked to play, slips back into character, southern accent and all, and strips naked. Kaneisha is taken a back, and he forcefully begins to have sex with her. As she yells out “Starbucks,” he recoils and begins to sob, she gets up from the bed and replies “thank you for listening.” And the play abruptly ends.
Leaving the theatre, I had more questions than answers. Slave Play is artful at raising many complex issues and it does not provide tidy resolution. It brings you to a cliff’s edge, before throwing a barrier in your way. It disarms you, prohibiting you from settling comfortably into a position of power as you recoil at the jarring displays on stage. It is wonderfully unsettling in its incompleteness. I found myself rooting for black characters to speak up for themselves and cringing at white characters who said and did all the wrong things. I reflected upon my own whiteness and positionality as the characters fumbled racial politics, relationship dynamics, and “wokeness” before me. I needed to discuss, debrief, decompress, and think more about what I had just seen. It lingered with me for days, then weeks.
As a scholar of slavery and its visual culture, perhaps I was desensitized to the language that punctuates the historical archive like “Negro,” “Negress,” “mulatto,” or “octoroon”. Or seeing black cast members play out tropes of slavery a la “yes massa” like a bygone era of Hollywood reminiscent of Gone With the Wind (1939). But then it dawned on me, I am watching a black woman eating a cantaloupe off the floor at the feet of her white partner. The vulvic imagery of the cut melon is featured prominently on the play’s marketing. While this act of Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy reveals itself as an artifice, not a supposed historical re-enactment, it is still striking.
Even as you pay attention to the characters overdone accents, their breaks in role play to snicker, or Kaneisha’s contemporary jewellery glimpsed beneath her tattered plantation dress, it can still feel jarring. Perhaps that’s why the black couple next to me walked out. Perhaps I reasoned to myself that knowing it was role play, knowing that there was some sort of consent involved for the characters made it okay. Power and control are central themes underlying the role-play therapy in which the couples are engaged. Power and control are also a central part of the legacies of slavery we have inherited. Who is desired? Who is desirable? What did consent mean in an era when people owned each other? Who has the cultural capital to represent themselves and in what light? Who must sit with discomfort and prejudice? Who gets to exploit and deny their privilege? Who gets their identity erased by colourism or who is hyper-visible with identities that supercede their complexity? Why do we find pleasure in suffering and humiliation? What does power have to do with sex?
Much has been hypothesized about the artistic choices made in this play. Although I cannot speak to the American runs, the London West End production seemed to stay true to the source with its pastoral plantation landscape in act onereflected to the audience via a mirrored back wall. In the backdrop, the audience sees themselves, their own reactions, and their own faces. You cannot hide from any of the characters or behaviours seen before you, or from yourself. Like rats in a professor’s lab, you can analyze every angle of the actor’s behaviours.
Director Robert O’Hara runs the production as two hours straight through without pause, even though there is the potential for a delineated break after act one when the therapists call to meet after a break. By denying the audience the normal break, one truly cannot escape the plot once the play begins. Above the stage is text announcing “nuh body touch me you nuh righteous,” lyrics from Rhianna’s song Work (2016) and Kaneisha’s song that accompanies her in times of trauma as she discloses and experiences it throughout the play. These lyrics of course speak to consent and virtue, relationships, and fragility more broadly. But Rihanna’s dancehall track and Bajan lyrics take these themes of blackness and slavery’s legacies to a wider Black Diaspora that includes the Caribbean, another site of enslaved black labour exploitation and racial politics beyond the US South. As much as slavery is understood as a history of economic exploitation, Slave Play demonstrates that another outcome or residue is interpersonal gender and sexual politics.
So, what is the purpose of this play? Why endeavour to take on a topic which courts such controversy and traverses such thorny territory? Harris is clearly interested in race and desire. In 2016, he penned an article “Decolonizing Desire” about examining his attraction to white men. An earlier play Daddy (2018), featured an older white man and a younger black man in a sexual-romantic relationship. Some commentators have speculated that Slave Play was made for a white audience, keeping in mind the majority demographic of the theatre going public, a largely inaccessible art form. But I disagree that this may be the case. I think Slave Play exists to demonstrate how legacies of slavery loom large in our culture and the sexual identities of black people more specifically. For this play’s black audience members, a recognition of the ways slavery and racism effect their lives, including their sexuality, may not be news. But for white audiences, thinking about the historical processes that have led to the present day from which they benefit may be a novel idea indeed. Or at least seeing it spelled out so clearly and personally across four relationships provides a unique frame of reference rather than the abstraction of history and society in general. This concurrent scrutiny is akin to CriticalWhiteness Studies by which whiteness is explicitly named and critiqued. Through an analysis of blackness and desire, comes a tangential/secondary analysis of whiteness and power.
For a (largely white) theatre-going audience so eager to gobble up narratives of America’s founding with a diverse cast set to hip-hop, this play takes racial awareness to a whole other, more critical level; one that is more in line with Afro-pessimist interpretations that Transatlantic Slavery’s effects linger large and heavy in contemporary society. It does so by setting these discussions of race within the intimate sexual lives of its characters black, white, and “in-between”. Rather than pathologizing black people, the play suggest that whiteness and racism are at fault for the anxieties and deficits of pleasure that BIPOC people experience. And perhaps that induced fear of racism is toxic to those subjected to it and alsopoisonous to its perpetrators.
While Slave Play may exist to explore racial politics and the legacies of slavery in society through the intimate lives of couples, did it need to be so on the nose? Did Kenisha need to beg Jim to call her a “nasty negress,” even if to teach him a lesson? A comparison can be drawn with Spike Lee’s use of blackface minstrelsy in his film satire Bamboozled (2000). To have black creatives – in that case Damon Wayans as Pierre Delacroix and Jada Pinkett Smith as Sloan – Hopkins – utilize the “master’s tools” in critique and storytelling is artful, enriches the conversation, and forces us to remember where these images and tropes originated. Although it cannot dismantle the “master’s house,” perhaps it can disarm these representations, taking away some of their power.
Seeing the white Jim willingly step into his role as an oppressive, patriarch was such a repulsive exercise of supremacy on many levels with an instant outcome of (self)damage as he sobbed immediately after forcing himself onto Kaneisha. Another comparison is the oeuvre of contemporary African American artist Kara Walkerwho utilizes tropes and stereotypes of blackness in popular culture through black on white silhouettes which portray graphic scenes of sexual subjection and cruelty in plantation settings. Scholars Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson write in their article “Searching for Climax” (2013) on black eroticisms and slavery, that by “unapologetically creating scenes of subjection, subjugation, violence, and ecstasy, (Walker) can cause disgust and ambivalence among spectators”. In these ways, using representations of slavery and racist caricatures is a proven tactic of artistic appropriation utilized by earlier artists like Betye Saar. But instead of “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” (1972), the usage of these harmful tropes by black creatives may be to confront, scrutinize, and analyze the interpersonal politics, body sovereignty, biased societal norms, and white-supremacist institutions that still exist.
By using these themes or tropes from slavery, artists aim not to forget where these ideas originate and analyze their continued and persistent residue.
As Allegra Frank of Vox, or For Harriet and Princesses Weekes agree in their YouTube vlog reviews of Slave Play, the piece has important messages and ideas. But did it need to expose its black cast or audiences to such subjugating displays? Princesses Weekes puts it bluntly that the playwright Harris fleshed out the queer black character Gary well, but with Kaneisha, as a black woman dating a white man: “you’ve never been called a bedwench to your face and it shows.”Perhaps the misogynoir of black women’s experiences in relationships with white men, needed more research and development with Harris lacking lived understanding.
So, I am left on the fence about these choices. Do they reinscribe the sexual suffering and power imbalances of slavery or liberate us from them? Of course, these ideas could be explored without the Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy aspect which would be less controversial and less jarring for black audiences, but not nearly as buzz-worthy. Maybe there is merit and a legitimate artistic precedent for a reappropriation of these representations given the confines of active-consent and role play for the characters. Furthermore, audience members do have the choice to participate/pay, get up and leave, or not go at all.
I’m not going to pretend to have answers about Slave Play, but any art that sparks this much debate, reflection, and introspection is worth paying attention to. The play is haunting with images of plantation sexual role play, heartbreak, and pain. While watching a drama unfold on stage, your mind wanders to society and its workings, and back again to the characters melodramatic and genuine expressions. It is subtly psychoanalytical not just of its characters and desires, but also its viewing audience, society, and power. Despite being sugar coated with satire and sex, it is still dense to absorb, digest, and “process”. It lays bare a historic and continued drive to pathologize black sexuality. Although queerness in the stories of Gary and Dustin, Patricia and Teá, or even Phillip’s pegging is underexamined in the plot, so is the kink and fetish dynamics that underpin the role-play therapy. The analysis of anhedonia, “Racialized Inhibiting Disorder,” and “musical obsession” is also opaque for a first-time viewer trying to absorb everything all at once. But perhaps it is asking too much for a play that already has much to reveal about inter-racial relationships or racialized desire and sexuality. Whether it is the history of slavery, dense theoretically rich artworks about slavery, or our complicated contemporary society, these intersecting ideas are rarely clear to understand.Slave Play demonstrates that neat answers aren’t always possible and sometimes all that remains is discomfort. It also demonstrates that society and relationships aren’t always satisfying, that oppression and virtue are two sides of the same whiteness, and that black people’s intimate lives continue to be tainted by the colonial histories that have come before.
Chris Gismondi Bio
Chris Gismondi is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of New Brunswick and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awarded art history scholar. He is also a curator and a current Graduate Research Fellow of Slavery North. His research focuses on the visual and material culture of Canadian Slavery. He is queer-white settler from Dish with One Spoon, Head of the Lake Treaty no. 14 (1806) territory.