Jeremy O. Harris on Slave Play, pleasure and Black Out theatre nights

Jeremy O. Harris was about 20 minutes late for our interview. While Fisayo Akindade and James Cusati-Moyer (who play Gary and Dustin in Slave Play) and I sat and made small talk at the Noël Coward Theatre – where the show will run until September – they asked if we could start without him. “He’s always a few minutes late,” Cusati-Moyer casually informs me. When Harris finally arrives, mid-Cusati-Moyer answering a question, he is carrying a big Dior shopping bag. He is, as Akindade remarked, “living his best life every day.” 

Most people are familiar with the controversies surrounding Slave Play before actually knowing what the play is about. The thought-provoking 12-Tony nominated play delves into the complex dynamics of three interracial couples who opt for an experimental therapy called “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy”. The Black partners, no longer sexually attracted to their white partners, use role play to confront their sexual and racial trauma. The London cast features Olivia Washington as Kaneisha, Kit Harington as Jim, Aaron Heffernan as Phillip, Annie McNamara as Alana, Cusati-Moyer as Dustin, and Akindade as Gary.

When my friends asked me about the plot before I had seen the play, I couldn’t tell them because I didn’t know anything about it. But I could recount the time Harris went on Ziwe, the satirical chat show by comedian Ziwe Fumudoh, where she asked him, “Why do you hate black women?” – a question prompted by the treatment of Kaneisha, the Black female protagonist in Slave Play. I could also recount the debates it prompted on social media around whether slavery role play was a productive medium to explore racialised power dynamics.

Harris himself is all too aware of the criticisms levelled against him. When asked about the play’s unique choice not to have an intermission, a decision made by director Robert O. Hara because “slaves didn’t get a break, why should they [the white audience]?” Harris is immediately defensive. “I read too many things, and this is just bothering me, so I’m going to set the record straight. People need to read better, especially critics. At the top of act two, I say that the audience will be here for an hour. And then, for another hour, you’re going to sit in therapy. Do not tell me that my play is too long, in act two, when I’ve already told you how long it will be. That’s it.”

That same evening, Harris was performing at The Royal Court Theatre in a play called Echo (Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen). The play by Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour has a new performer who takes the stage each night. The actors are unrehearsed and unprepared, only being given the script once they’re on stage. Perhaps preoccupied with his performance in the evening, Harris spent a significant amount of time on his phone during our interview.   

Slave Play is a piece of theatre that prompts many feelings, just like its playwright. Whether you think it’s good, bad, or criminal, it fulfils the fundamental purpose of art: It makes you feel things deeply. After their first Black Out Night performance, we spoke to Harris, Akinade, and Cusati-Moyer about the controversies surrounding the play, Britain’s unique relationship with slavery, and the importance of bringing theory into the public domain. 

What has it been like to bring Slave Play to the UK? Have you noticed any differences in audiences’ reactions? I went to the show with my American-Canadian friend, who responded differently to my peers and I, who live in the UK.

Jeremy O. Harris: A lot of people have been asking that. There’s this sense that everyone wants to feel like they’re unique. But what’s really fun is that this play has a sort of universality because it’s about relationships, which means that audiences have responded universally. So when people say ‘Oh, the Brits won’t do this’ or that ‘Americans didn’t get that’ – like no, they all laughed at that same part. I think partially because this is a Black play and a play where people talk about the race that’s on stage, it’s easy for people to imagine that it’s more specific than an Arthur Miller play. However, they fail to understand that Arthur Miller’s plays are about race, All My Sons for example is a play about American race issues. Same with Long Day’s Journey, with Brian Cox in it. I think it’s just now we’re at a moment where plays by Black, Brown, and female writers are starting to have more space on these stages, and we’re starting to see that our stories are also universal.

Fair. But there’s an interesting point in the programme for Slave Play, where you’re in conversation with British playwrights Juliet Gilkes Romero and Mark Ravenhill, and the pair mention that they were never taught about slavery in school. I think it’s understandable to be curious about the different audience reactions because British people and Americans arguably have a slightly different understanding of slavery due to what they were and weren’t taught – and the difference in how slavery is discussed in the UK.

Fisayo Akinade: Yeah, our Black history at school was Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks and the transatlantic slave trade. So we didn’t discuss Britain’s part in it. I was embarrassingly old when I found out about Britain’s hand in it. Kit Harington did something interesting very early on in the play. In act three, he has Jim, the character he plays, slip into an English accent when he enters the fantasy play with Kaneisha. He didn’t want to let the audience off the hook and think this is an American thing. The legacy of slavery affects all Black people, and white people. What it did structurally and socially to white people for them to have the belief that they could subjugate an entire race of people, and then what it did to Black people has to be recognised globally. Kit was really bold in making that choice.

Jeremy O. Harris: I just want to go back to what you mentioned about your American-Canadian friend. I’ve noticed on X that many young people want everyone to have the same opinion. It’s like having an individualised opinion is a crime. I think maybe for her, she left the play thinking, ‘as a Black American, I feel this way, and you can’t possibly understand it. Because all Black Americans feel this way, and you guys [British people] all feel this way.’ But there were a lot of Black Americans who felt a lot of different ways about the play, as well as a lot of Black British people who also felt a lot of different ways about it. I think that’s kind of beautiful. It’s cool that Black people can have different opinions about things because we’re humans.

I went on X after watching the play to see how people have spoken about it online and came across a post that read: ‘If you liked Slave Play, you’re an enemy of Black people,’ and I just thought wow, that’s extreme.

Fisayo Akinade: I think you must engage with the play fully to criticise it fully. There are people who see the title and think it’s just about sex and slavery, and they get hot and angry, and that’s it. I’ve got friends who have very firm opinions, but they sat there from beginning to end, and so I have to hear them out and respect their opinion because they engaged with it. If all you’ve done is hear the title or read a synopsis, then no, I’m not going to give you my time because you’ve not given me yours.

after hating slave play when i first became aware of it in 2018, i was given a free ticket to watch it on the west end last night. i can now say it is categorically the worst play ever written and produced and if you endorse it you are an enemy of Black people & Black women.

— q (@ATAIKlRU) July 11, 2024

Our former Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, had a lot to say about the Black Out Nights initiative (BON), which are performance nights aimed at all-Black identifying audiences. Have you had BON in the UK yet? I wanted to know if BON had an impact on how you guys performed as actors.

Fisayo Akinade: Our first one in the UK was last night (17 July). First of all, I was nervous. I thought they were all going to hate it. But then the laughter was so full-bodied from the get-go. It was like they rode with you in a way I’ve never experienced before. Every word a Black person said was always met with what Olivia called ‘laughs of recognition’ and ‘understanding’. It fuelled us in a way that has never happened before. Gary, my character, has a monologue at the end of the play, where he realises his worth, and now he knows what he’s going to do with that knowledge, and the audience is so responsive. I have this line where I say: ‘No motherfucker, I am the prize,’ and there was this bomb of collective praise. It was monumentally moving, and I genuinely didn’t know what to do. I was like, do I stop, or do I carry on? I’m trying to stay in it, be here with James, and do the scene. But this amazing thing was happening in front of me live; it was the closest thing to magic that theatre gets.

Jeremy O. Harris: This kid came up to me last night and reminded me of this Sarah Kane quote, where she says, ‘Why can’t theatre be as gripping as footie?’ Where everyone is vocal and everyone is involved. They told me that this was the first time they’d been to the theatre, and it felt like a football match. But it also feels like Shakespeare. People were so engaged and leaned in and would shout ‘encore’, ‘encore’, and the actors would do their monologues again. There’s one production in the 19th century, in New York of Hamlet, in which the actor gave the ‘to be or not to be’ speech eight times in a row because the audience couldn’t get enough. That’s iconic, and I felt like our audience could have gotten there last night.

James Cusati-Moyer: What I hear and feel on stage during BON is active listening. Most white people, when they come into the audience, they can forget that privilege of what it is to sit in that seat. They forget all the tools they have in front of them to sit and lean forward and listen; they just want to be entertained. They want the show to wash over them, to sit back and for us to entertain them. That intelligent listening, that desire to sit there and listen – that’s one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had performing. There’s nothing like it.

“A lot of my plays are about taking theory and putting it into practicality or onto bodies. I am taking ideas from the ivory tower and bringing them into the embodied because my mom is not going to read bell hooks.” – Jeremy O. Harris

The word ‘anhedonia’ is repeated in the play. It’s not a word I was familiar with before Slave Play–

Jeremy O. Harris: [Looks up from his phone] Google it. 

Yeah, I did. I reencountered it when I read bell hooks’ Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance for this interview. hooks writes about the fact we are a culture unable to feel pleasure as “our senses are daily assaulted to such an extent that an emotional numbness sets in”. Yet Black people are seen as having secret access to intense pleasure, particularly pleasures of the body, but Kaneisha, Phillip and Gary all have anhedonia. What made you want to tackle the issue of pleasure? 

Jeremy O. Harris: You’re so smart, by the way. Nobody has clocked the bell hooks of it all, even though it’s in the suggested reading. The idea of the play came from a question about pleasure, consent and partnership. Knowing that this play was about Black partners, white partners and pleasure, I just started mining things. I mined Jennifer Nash, a very important thinker about Afro-femme sexuality and pornographic representations of Black women. I read Ariane Cruz, an NYU scholar and writer about Black women and kink. I read L.H. Stallings, who’s quoted at the top of the play, who wrote Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures. I was also thinking about Afro-pessimism; a lot of Black men write about Afro-pessimism, and a lot of black women were writing about what it means to find pleasure inside these things. A lot of my plays are about taking theory and putting it into practicality or onto bodies. I am taking ideas from the ivory tower and bringing them into the embodied because my mom is not going to read bell hooks. She’s not going to read L.H. Stallings. A lot of people who are critiquing the play have not read any of these people. But now, they might be a little more familiar with their ideas. Hopefully, it will open their minds to new ideas about Blackness and theoretical spaces around Blackness that they maybe hadn’t thought about before.

Slave Play is showing now at the Noël Coward Theatre until 21 September 2024.