Jeremy O. Harris. Photo: Mamadi Doumbouya In the winter of 2015, the playwright Jeremy O. Harris decided to write Slave Play as a bit of a dare. He was at a holiday party in Prospect Heights, where he got into a heated debate with a group of writers about “erotics, desire, and who gets to own fantasy.” One of them, a straight white guy, said he had recently enjoyed enacting a rape fantasy with a partner. Feeling his Socratic self, Harris decided to troll him.
From there, Slave Play became a critical hit that went beyond the bubble of the downtown theater world, turning into a conversational flash point in cultural circles. During the final weekend of its run in January, Madonna, Whoopi Goldberg, Anna Wintour, Stephen Sondheim, and Jake Gyllenhaal were among the attendees.
“I was supposed to write in the car, and you kept me up doing your job, so I’m going to keep you up doing mine,” Harris tells me. He stretches out on the bed with his MacBook on his stomach, millennial-pink Acne beanie on his head, and a one-and-a-half-liter bottle of Evian within reach as he queues up some songs — serpentwithfeet, the soundtrack to BPM, and Frank Ocean — to get him on the right wavelength for the work.
“I was always like, ‘I want to make a play that does not pretend as soon as you leave out of here, you aren’t going to an incognito window on your phone and looking up ‘ebony porn,’ because you are,” Harris says. “They just delete the history, or they don’t. For me, that is a metaphor for race relations writ large in our country: Our understanding of history is a constant erasing of our incognito window.
I would learn over the course of 28 hours that this is just how Jeremy O. Harris operates. His mind is bright like quicksilver; he switches constantly between topics, tasks, and worlds; it’s part of what has allowed him to traverse the various spheres of theater, art, fashion, academia, social media, and criticism.
As the pages print, Harris orders us egg sandwiches and iced coffee on Snackpass to pick up on our way, while Foley tells me about a play Harris put on during his first year at Yale, called Water Sports; or insignificant white boys, that made him an enfant terrible. The Yale School of Drama never officially sanctioned the production, mainly because of regulations about which students can perform in official plays.
Harris grabs the pages, still warm from the printer, and we’re off again, following the golden lining of his coat fluttering in the wind.
I love Broadway!
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