WithDaddyandSlave Play, Jeremy O. Harris does just that (sometimes literally).
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Feeling his Socratic self, Harris decided to troll him.
You could rape anyone, any day, he said.
You probably have raped someone.
What does that mean that youre owning this?
Everything got really tense for everyone, Harris recalls.
I was like,Wait.
Why is it tense now, but it wasnt tense before?
At that moment, the idea forSlave Playsprung out of his brain, Athena-like.
It was a challenge, a lark, an intellectual exercise.
It was like a joke.
That is a remarkably fast track, says James Nicola, the NYTWs artistic director.
It usually takes us years and years to piece things together like that.
But we felt the nature of the conversation was pretty urgent and we didnt want to wait.
Page Sixreportedthat producers were divided on the play, as well as on a potential move to Broadway.
Harris went to Tulum for a couple of weeks.
Still, he had kept his end of the bargain.
Fuck, why am I yawning now?
says Harris as we walk into his room in New Haven around 3 a.m. via Uber from New York.
When we walk in, theres a friend sleeping on said couch.
Whatever Harris has to get done gets done in the moment.
Specifically, the charge thatSlave Playis too much about ideas and arguments as opposed to humanist portraiture.
Its like,Yeah, of course theyre ideas.Duh!
One of the pleasures of theater [is] being around a hyperarticulate argument.
When we leave, we can continue those arguments with the people were with.
Indeed, I became mildly obsessed withSlave Playfor the ferocity and brazenness of the ideas.
Something whispered, finally screamed.
How do the ghosts of history invade the bedroom?
What would it mean to, quite literally, fuck with white supremacy?
They just delete the history, or they dont.
He halts the production, and everyone elses fantasy, by calling out the safe word:Starbucks!
Throughout the second act, theyre at an impasse.
He doesnt understand why theyre doing this; shes frustrated that hes not listening.
The third act, then, is the reckoning.
He says, you could nod your head, and she does wordlessly.
He then rapes her until she says the safe word and they stop.
Theyre both in tears, and she ends the play by saying, Thank you, baby.
Thank you for listening.
She saw the act as unquestionably rape, whereas I saw it as invited domination.
He gestures to the row of books on his windowsill Can you hand me the Jacobean-tragedies book behind you?
I would learn over the course of 28 hours that this is just how Jeremy O. Harris operates.
He relishes in the intellectual joust, parsing ideas, and hearing about new ones.
You get the sense that he could have done anything, but right now, hes playwriting.
Volleyballby the Japanese artist Chikae Ide.
Is Tarell going to be there?
Harris swats away the question, annoyed.
Why does everybody keep asking me that?
I ask how they met, and Harris says he saw Foley in a production ofAlice in Wonderland.
It was love at first sight.
Jeremys a presence that were lucky to be in.
Or, Jeremys a supernova consuming all the energy around him!
Foley cackles, making a cheeky reference to the way McCraney describes Harris in aNew YorkTimesprofile.
Yeah, you have to attribute [that] to Mr. Alvin McCraney.
Yale School of Shade, Foley says with a grin.
And rather than using the theater, he staged the show at the art gallery.
I dont like to ask permission, says Harris.
I just like to do a thing.
I was like, I fucking wrote this play.
Im going to do it.
That sort of started my relationship with Yale.
(His thesis play, titledYell, is a critical review of his time at the institution.)
Along the way, each guide meets and interacts with gay legends James Baldwin and Robert Mapplethorpe.
Glances and kisses are exchanged; the black-white dyad loops and inverts.
Harris played Baldwin; Foley played His Friend.
It was Jeremy, getting naked and having Champagne poured all over him as piss, Foley recalls.
It was the event of the fall!
All the art kids, undergrads, and school of drama people wedged into this hallway.
So many of the faculty came that I think it was just,Okay, cool.
Dont do that again, but good job!
When we arrive, McCraney is waiting, straight-backed and imperious, with a group of students and actors.
If hes ticked by Harriss tardiness, hes just cooly so.
Unfazed, Harris passes out the scripts, assigns roles, and begins to talk.
We did play the playlist, replies McCraney.
But we didnt know when to stop.
Its here that the language takes on a cushioned, academic edge.
People wonder about intent, vision, and references, and Harris tells them how he sees the tableaux.
Maybe it could be staged in a place like St. John the Divine?
Next, they readThe Live-in, which is inspired by Harriss real-life friend.
I loveGirls, Harris says.
Because weve been chasing her since.
We all sawGirlsand got filled with rage that it existed.
How did this happen for this other person whos 24?
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.
They canceled two previews of my show, he says with a slight whine.
They always cancel previews, McCraney replies.
Im gonna die.
Youre not gonna die.
I ask him about his relationship with McCraney.
Harris is reluctant to talk about it.
I always have difficulties with people in positions of power, he says.
You know, complications.
Thats the anti-institutional bent that I have.
And I dont envy having to do what he does.
(Have you had that happen before?
Where people are like,Let me shave you.)
As for himself, he seems to take a perverse pleasure in the assumptions people project onto his body.
Some people think I chase white dick all the time, he says.
They dont need to know.
Franklin wants a father figure, and over three acts, he regresses into baby talk.
His mother, Zora (Charlayne Woodard), arrives; a struggle ensues.
Power subtly shifts between Franklin and Andre, too.
Its the Hegelian dialectic, only stretched and laid out in the California sun next to a Hockneyblue pool.
Like Daddy,there is a biological father figure physically absent, but palpably present hanging over our conversations.
Harris grew up in Martinsville, Virginia, a small city on the southern border abutting North Carolina.
She practiced on his head when he was in middle school, twisting, braiding, and dying it.
When I ask him about his father, the air seizes around us.
I dont want to talk about him, he replies.
My mom is the only parent that matters.
Instead of spending the day in New Haven, were heading straight back to New York.
He notes that he won another bet he made with his roommate: cracking 10,000 followers before they graduated.
Oh my God, he exclaims.
Theyre just giving me a suit.
Im friends with the brand, he says casually.
Friend is a common designation for the many people, institutions, and companies in his orbit.
He makes friends horizontally and up the totem pole.
(The two co-wrote the upcoming A24 filmZolabased off the epic Twitter thread.)
He became friends with Nef at a Fourth of July pool party atStonewalldirector Roland Emmerichs house.
Hes friends with the clothing brands Thom Browne and Telfar.
He introduces me to people as his friend, as well.
My body suffered from the tyranny of the white gaze.
I learned how to make the gaze look and then look away.
Onstage, he and Schreck enjoy some banter about the success of their respective plays.
So theres a whole theme here, theres a theme around reparations, see?
Its crazy, right?
As someone who did, I can say that each of your dollars did work like reparations for me!
Which is exactly what I told Anna Wintour when I shook her hand as she left my play!
The audience, concentric pods of suits and blowouts, titters along.
At some point he stopped apologizing for his difference, and his personal style is an expression of that.
I just stopped worrying … and decided to live recklessly, he continues.
White people with power see themselves as something more than human.
That allows them to live recklessly.
Thats how they can get a DUI and a manslaughter charge and still think they can run for senator.
I realized their gaze meant actually nothing.
The minute I took their gaze away, I was like,Oh, no.
Im already a superhero, too.
One man fawns over his coat and asks him how one might possess such a thing.
(you’ve got the option to buy it, replies Harris.)
Heshot, the little blond, the man says.
Is he naked in the show?
I ask him who that was.
I have no idea, he replies as we exit.
I was going to go up there and shame all those rich people.
The conversation broadens to the underlying question: How do you get the white money into the black theater?
You ask for it, Harris says matter-of-factly.
Scott Rudin has already commissioned two plays from him.
And according to Nicola, conversations about a Broadway transfer ofSlave Playare still ongoing and very much alive.
And that was something.
Im not holding on to that burden of representation.
If youre black, and youve been waiting for a black Lars von Trier Im that dude.
Right now, hes managing to walk the impressive tightrope between the periphery and the center.
I think its recklessness mixed with a fluency in the language of power, Harris muses.
I know the history of power.
I can speak the language of powerbrokers in a different way.
He puts down his glass and calls an Uber to New Haven.
Its 3:21 a.m., and he has class in the morning.
