A trio of interracial couples let it all hang out in group therapy as Center Theatre Group presents the Broadway production of Jeremy O. Harris’s daringly provocative, deliberately discomforting, and frequently damn funny Slave Play.

The three couples are:

Kaneisha (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy), described by the playwright as “a dark, black woman unafraid of what she wants,” and Jim (Paul Alexander Nolan), “a white man and inheritor of more than he knows how to handle.”

Alana (Elizabeth Stahlmann), “a white woman who wants more than the world sees fit to give her,” and Phillip (Jonathan Higginbotham), “a mulatto who still has to learn his color.”

Gary (Jakeem Dante Powell), “a dark, black man whose life has been lived with the full trauma of his color,” and Dustin (Devin Kawaoka), “a white man but the lowest type of white—dingy, an off-white.”

The therapeutic process they’re undergoing, Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy, has each couple given a role-playing assignment designed to help the black partner in the relationship reengage intimately with his or her white partner by describing feelings they’ve heretofore been unable to express.

Kaneisha becomes a pre-Civil War slave opposite Jim’s “po’ white trash” overseer, Philip is Southern belle Alana’s musically inclined mixed-race house slave, and Dustin plays a white indentured servant taking orders from Gary as his black slave boss.

It doesn’t take long for things to get hot and steamy, so much so that the Broadway production required not one but two intimacy directors, Claire Warden and Teniece Divya Johnson (whose work Johnson recreates here), and perhaps for this reason a number of ticketholders at Wednesday’s Mark Taper Forum opening night opted to exit the theater when the simulated sex apparently got rather a bit too real for them to watch.

If the first of Slave Play’s three acts (presented without an intermission) suggests we’ll be remaining in the Antebellum South throughout the duration, the sudden appearance of lesbian grad-student couple Teá (Chalia La Tour) and Patricia (Irene Sofia Lucio) transports us abruptly from role plays to a group therapy session where Southern accents are dropped … rather more quickly than the guard that at least a few of them still have up.

Slave Play made a lot of people uncomfortable on Broadway. (Morgan Parker’s “A Note On Your Discomfort” makes it clear to those perusing the program that the playwright expects nothing less than for you to be squirming a bit in your seat.)

And it’s likely to do the same at the Taper as it casts a searing light not just on racism but on colorism as well. (Phillip is so light skinned, it was only when showering that his college soccer teammates saw him as black, and it’s only in contrast to his “jet black” partner that Dustin, presumably part Asian, sees himself as white.)

Along with that discomfort comes the unsettling notion that centuries of racism may just make any mixed coupling impossible to sustain. (I can’t help wondering what a talkback would sound like were an audience to be made up entirely of black/white couples.)

Fortunately for those who don’t mind feeling ill at ease, Slave Play packs a comedic punch to go along with the dramatic fireworks provided an audience gives itself permission to laugh.

Arriving directly from Broadway with seven of its closing-night cast members intact, Slave Play at the Taper gives Angelinos the chance to see the Best Play Tony nominee exactly as it was directed on Broadway by Tony nominee Robert O’Hara.

La Tour’s fiery Tony-nominated featured performance gets recreated on the Taper stage as does the production’s Tony-nominated design (nominations for Clint Ramos’s mirror-backed scenic design that never lets an audience forget it’s as much about them as it is about the characters on stage, Dede Ayite’s period and contemporary costumes, Jiyoun Chang’s dramatic lighting design, and Lindsay Jones’ R&B-infused sound design and original score).

There’s not a weak link in Slave Play’s powerhouse New York cast, and I can only imagine how taxed Crowe-Legacy, Higginbotham, Kawaoka, La Tour, Lucio, Nolan, Powell, and Stahlmann must be by their roles’ intensive demands (including some of the most intimate contact I’ve witnessed on an L.A. stage) and how drained they must be by the time they take their bows.

Jordan Lis Cooper, Rashaad Hall, Kineta Kunutu, James Patrick Nelson, and Galen J. Williams are understudies. Kelly A. Martindale is production stage manager and Julia Zayas-Meléndez is assistant stage manager.

Slave Play won’t be everybody’s cup of tea. Indeed, it may be a hard sell for those put off by sensitive issues and semi-explicit sex. But for audiences willing to take the risk, the rewards are many.

Mark Taper Forum, 35 N. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles.
www.centertheatregroup.org

–Steven Stanley
February 16, 2020
Photos: Craig Schwartz

Tags: Center Theatre Group, Jeremy O. Harris, Los Angeles Theater Review, Mark Taper Forum