Early on in the ferocious new play Slave Play, a slave woman named Kaneisha (Teyonah Parris) asks her overseer if he is going beat her. The overseer, Jim (Paul Alexander Nolan), asks her why she would ever think a thing like that.
“Well,” says Kaneisha, her voice dripping with mingled lust and fear, “you got that whip, aintcha?”
Jim is shocked by the reminder. He doesn’t like to recognize that he is carrying a whip. He doesn’t even really know how to use it, he protests: When he tries to crack it menacingly, it hits him in the face.
Jim also doesn’t like it when Kaneisha calls him “master,” because, he says, he’s not like one of those “Big House Folk.” He’s not her owner, he reminds her; he’s just an overseer. They’re more or less on the same ground, he assures Kaneisha. “Only difference is, I, you know? I’s sorta your manager.”
But Jim is carrying the whip nonetheless, and Kaneisha isn’t. And over the course of Slave Play’s two-hour run, as Jim and Kaneisha’s sadomasochistic sexual relationship unfolds, and as the rug is pulled out from under the audience again and again, it is never quite possible to forget that Jim is the one with the whip.
And by extension, so are the white people in the audience.
The joyously daring Slave Play comes from the playwright
Jeremy O. Harris, a rising young star who’s still finishing up his term at the Yale School of Drama. “Everyone who’s watching Slave Play is fully a part of a system that is consuming and profiting off of black bodies and black identity,”
Harris told the New York Times earlier this year. “The play does not allow you to escape that fact” — especially not under Robert O’Hara’s pointed direction in the current production at the New York Theatre Workshop.