'Slave Play,' A Painful and Cathartic Experience

 

Antoinette Crowe-Legacy and Paul Alexander Nolan

By Darlene Donloe 

This is a painful play to watch, feel and experience! 

There is a lot to unpack in Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play, now running at the Mark Taper Forum through March 13, 2022.

With themes like race, sex, power relations, trauma, and interracial relationships, it’s not an easy show to watch. That’s because there is an uneasy, uncomfortable realness to all of those issues that aren’t easy to witness, especially while in the midst of a mixed audience sitting silently within a theater. And yet, it’s the perfect place to do just that.

There were many moments in this complex show when it was quite clear some white people didn’t know if it was appropriate to laugh. There were many more moments when they laughed in places that were totally inappropriate – and literally were not funny.

This play, which takes place on a Southern plantation co-opted for therapeutic purposes, makes you think - hard. And just like the characters, the audience finds itself in the middle of a therapy session. 

The first act of the play is a send-up of tongue-in-cheek, sex-filled, master-slave vignettes that take place during slavery. It’s all part of the therapy.

One vignette has a Black, female slave enticing an overseer, another has a mistress enticing a male slave and yet another has a white, male slave and a Black overseer. 

Jonathan Higginbotham and Elizabeth Stahlmann

The play, which earned a record 12 Tony nominations, the most for any play in the history of those awards, focuses on three interracial couples.  One is comprised of a Black woman and a white man (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy and Paul Alexander Nolan), the next with a mulatto male and a white woman (Jonathan Higginbotham and Elizabeth Stahlmann), and a Black man and his white male lover (Jakeem Dante Powell and Devin Kawaoka).  Each brings their own drama while dealing with some form of actual or perceived racism. 

Jakeem Dante Powell and Devin Kawaoka

The question becomes just how far racism has or hasn’t evolved since the abolition of slavery. 

The second act of the play takes place within a therapy session involving all three couples – where they have a chance to unpack the Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy they went through in the beginning. The therapy is designed to help Black partners reengage intimately with white partners from who they no longer receive sexual pleasure. 

That’s when all of the real talk begins to happen. And what is revealed is disturbing, cathartic, and necessary. 

Chalia La Tour

The therapy session is facilitated by two, hilarious women Tea (Chalia La Tour) and Patricia (Irene Sofia Lucio) who try to get to the core of each of the couple’s relationships. Sometimes it’s successful, sometimes it isn’t.

Irene Sofia Lucio

There is no one way to watch this show. It will affect everyone differently – which is probably what Harris was going for. 

The actors are exceptional! Kudos to director Robert O’Hara who assembled an impressive cast that includes Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, Jonathan Higginbotham, Devin Kawaoka, Chalia La Tour, Irene Sofia Lucio, Paul Alexander Nolan, Jakeem Dante Powell, and Elizabeth Stahlmann.

Slave Play, Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Avenue, LA; 8 p.m. Tuesday-Fridays, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays through March 13; $35-$110, 213 972-4400 or CenterTheatreGroup.org

Running time: 2 hours (with no intermission)

COVID protocol: Proof of full vaccination and booster is required. Masks are required at all times.

On the DONLOE SCALE: D (don’t bother), O (oh, no), N (needs work), L (likable), O (oh, yeah), and E (excellent), Slave Play gets an O (oh, yeah).