'Slave Play' Review: A Brave New Work That's Ferocious And Funny

If you’re planning to  see "Slave Play," now at New York Theater Workshop, then you should stop reading this review now. That's because there's a twist at the end of the first act that's genuinely surprising.

Seriously. Go find something else to do.

But even if you know the broad outlines of what happens in this play, Jeremy O. Harris's comedy is so ferociously original, so daring, and so funny that your  foreknowledge won't ruin it. Instead, you may take (as I did) an insider's delight, because you are waiting for what's coming.

Harris, a young, black playwright who is still in graduate school at Yale, accomplishes something very complex here. He's written an uproariously entertaining play that also addresses race relations in an exceptionally nuanced, sometimes uncomfortable and often bawdy way.

The first act takes place in what appears to be a plantation in the antebellum South. Three interracial couples — one the master and one the slave — have pretty racy sex. There's a dildo. And some (literal) boot-licking. It's not for prudish or the faint of heart.

Then comes the twist. It turns out that these are contemporary, interracial couples who are actually part of an experimental group therapy program. The couples entered into it because the black partners are unable to feel desire.

For the white lovers, this type of role-playing is mostly playful, though sometimes disturbing or frightening. They seem unable to understand the strong reaction their partners have. They think the world has moved far beyond antebellum days. But the therapists think differently. To them, the American slave experience is foundational, and coded into the DNA of African American bodies. The black partners can’t get beyond the terrible aspects of our history, they think, until they re-live it in an intentional way. Only then can they reconnect as a couple.

Needless to say, this doesn’t go the way the therapists thought it would.

Harris’s premise is fascinating and it moves the discussion beyond surface talk of who is racist and who is not. These couples love each other and they've been committed for a long time. Yet the black member of each couple struggles to understand who they are as African American men and women when their partners are of a different race. Can they be fully accepted and understood on their own terms — that is, can they be seen by their white partners the way they want to be seen? How do the intimacies of the bedroom re-create the racial tensions of the world outside it? The conversations around these questions are raw and unflinching.

Yet "Slave Play" is funnier than you might expect, handing out its medicine with generous handfuls of sugar. And the characters feel real, not people devised to illustrate a point. This is masterful storytelling, searing and illuminating, and not to be missed.

Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris and directed by Robert O'Hara at NYTW, through Jan. 13.