One of 2018’s most buzzed about Off-Broadway theater productions will be coming to The Great White Way later this year.
The critically-acclaimed and controversial “Slave Play,” written by recent Yale graduate Jeremy O. Harris, is scheduled to start performances at Broadway’s Golden Theatre on Sept 10.
The strictly limited engagement, whose cast hasn’t been announced, will be directed by Robert O’Hara, who helmed the play’s sold-out run at the New York Theater Workshop last fall.
Officially described as “an antebellum fever-dream, where fear and desire entwine in the looming shadow of the Master’s House” at the MacGregor Plantation in “The Old South,” “Slave Play” is the recipient of the Rosa Parks Playwriting Award and the 2018 Paula Vogel Award, respectively.
Simplified, the play revolves around three interracial couples participating in an irreverent form of sexual therapy, which involves cosplay of the Antebellum Slavery era set on a Virginia plantation.
Troy Carter — former manager of Lady Gaga, Eve, John Legend and Meghan Trainor — is among the producers of “Slave Play,” also including Level Forward, which is philanthropist Abigail Disney‘s company, and Nine Stories, which is a venture from Jake Gyllenhaal and Riva Marker.
Greg Nobile and Jana Shea of Seaview Productions are lead producers of the Broadway adaptation.
The New York Theatre Workshop world premiere of Harris’s critically acclaimed debut starred “If Beale Street Could Talk” actress Teyonah Parris, Ato Blnakson-Wood, Chalia La Tour, Sullivan Jones, Annie McNamara, James Cusati-Moyer, Irene Sofia Lucio and Paul Alexander Nolan.
The play drew ire and criticism on social media and websites, derided it as racist and anti-black. A change.org petition, launched to shut down the production, after one black woman who said she attended the show and was “terribly offended and traumatized by the graphic imagery,” nearly reached its 5,000 signature goal.
Addressing the online controversy — which was sparked after an image of Parris twerking for what appears to be her slave master — Harris told The Root.com he was surprised, angry and frustrated by the controversy. “I’ve been hit by a car before and in a lot of ways that’s what this feels like. And that’s a complicated and weighted thing to say [but] I know what sort of rigor I brought to releasing this play.”
About his debut on The Great White Way, Harris described the experience, thus far, “is both exhilarating and humbling.”
“It also articulates that the leaps the community made in the past Broadway season might not have been a fad but the beginning of a new moment for the theater to once again attempt to represent discursive American theatrical expression not situated solely within the imaginaries of cis white men, but the imaginaries of all Americans.”
“Slave Play” also marks the Broadway debut of O’Hara, an award winning playwright himself whose near 25 year career include credits such as “Bootycandy,” “In the Continuum” and “Insurrection: Holding History.”
“I’m thrilled as a black queer artist to be collaborating with another black queer artist on what will be both of our Broadway debuts,” he said. “I think the idea that I can say that openly and proudly is rather profound given the history of our country and of the American theater, but more specifically Broadway which has had and continues to have a general lack of diversity and diverse stories.”
According to a spokesperson, producers have earmarked 10,000 tickets priced at the bargain basement price of $39 each throughout the 17-week run “to help ensure that the production is accessible to all ticket buyers.”
