‘Slave Play’: Pushing buttons on sex & race

‘SLAVE PLAY’ (On ground, left to right): Ato Blankson-Wood, James Cusati-Moyer, Sullivan Jones, Annie McNamara, Joaquina Kalukango, Paul Alexander Nolan. (In red boxes, left to right): Irene Sofia Lucio & Chalia La Tour. Photo: Matthew Murphy

SLAVE PLAY
By Jeremy O. Harris
Directed by Robert O’Hara
Through January 19, 2020
Golden Theatre
252 West 45th Street
212-239-6200, https://slaveplaybroadway.com/

By Scott Harrah

Sex and race are topics that push everyone’s proverbial buttons, and the two themes are explored via outrageous extremes in Jeremy O. Harris’s provocative Slave Play.

The show, in the beginning, is a series of uncomfortable, absurdist S&M sexual vignettes but ends up actually being a send-up of psychotherapy and relationships. It also tries to make serious statements about race in America. Playwright Jeffrey O. Harris’s overlong one-act tale mostly chronicles, in the first hour, titillating simulated sex scenes among interracial couples, followed by a second hour that explains, from a psychological and historical perspective, everything we’ve seen previously.

The scenes in the show’s first half are stereotypical in the absolute worst porn-style way and so intentionally offensive that they just look absurd and pointless. In the first vignette, Kaneisha (Joaquina Kalukango) is an African slave shown twerking to Rihanna’s “Work” while white overseer Jim (Paul Alexander Nolan) reveals how much he likes her, brandishing a whip as she calls him “master” (please, don’t ask).

There is the antebellum older white woman Alana (Annie McNamara), seen sporting 19^th century finery, while speaking in derogatory sexual innuendoes to her well-dressed, younger black lover Phillip (Sullivan Jones). She calls him her “Mandingo” (perhaps an homage to the awful “blaxploitation” film and novel of the same name). Phillip must endure Alana’s racist blather about his ample endowment. Eventually she whips out a dildo and penetrates him, asking if he likes her being “the man.”

We also have the gay male couple, Gary (Ato Blankson-Wood) and Dustin (James Cusati-Moyer). Dustin is a white indentured servant who is overseen by African American stud Gary. They both sport black Calvin Klein underwear and leather boots and you can draw your own conclusions about what happens next.

In the next hour, we learn that all this racially charged sex way down in pre-Civil War Dixie is an erotic phantasmagoria of fantasies of role playing and we’re really watching three interracial couples in “antebellum sexual performance therapy.” There is a lot of bantering from the couples and pretentious psychobabble from the two therapists, Teá (Chalia LaTour) and Patricia (Irene Sofia Lucio). The point (or lack thereof) of this group study is for the couples to better understand their racial standing, only to pulverize each relationship. Supposedly, they are told, in interracial couples someone is “the prize” and someone is “the master,” everyone is doomed to their own self-destruction, blah, blah, blah.

Despite the play’s shortcomings, there are some good performances here from cast members who play dual roles as both modern couples and their antebellum counterparts. Joaquina Kalukango is one of the most outstanding, displaying many raw emotions, and she is particularly effective in one of the show’s final scenes. As Gary, Ato Blankson-Wood is perfect, especially in a therapy sequence in which he goes off on his partner Dustin.

Perhaps playwright Jeremy O. Harris wanted to write a play that addressed, in a lighthearted way, the important topics of racism and America’s sad history of slavery while also examining modern-day human sexuality. Slave Play originated Off Broadway last year at the New York Theatre Workshop and in a smaller, less commercial production this show works best. However, as directed by Robert O’Hara for the Broadway stage, it is too flawed and ultimately unsatisfying to work as either a solid comedy or eye-opening drama about such sensitive subject matter.

Edited by Scott Harrah
Published October 12, 2019
Reviewed at October 10, 2019 press performance.

‘SLAVE PLAY’: Annie McNamara & Sullivan Jones. Photo: Matthew Murphy

‘SLAVE PLAY’: James Cusati-Moyer & Ato Blankson-Wood. Photo: Matthew Murphy

‘SLAVE PLAY’: (Left to right) Ato Blankson-Wood, Chalia La Tour, Joaquina Kalukango (kneeling), Irene Sofia Lucio, Sullivan Jones, Annie McNamara, Paul Alexander Nolan, & James Cusati-Moyer. Photo: Matthew Murphy.