When you depart Canadian Stage after experiencing Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, you won’t just have a few thoughts – you’ll have psychic shrapnel. This isn’t the kind of theatre that prompts polite post-show discussion over drinks. It’s theatre that detonates in your consciousness, leaving you to sort through the debris of your attitudes and assumptions … about race, sexuality, trauma, and even theatre.
This, I presume, is the reason why Canadian Stage distributes a fat 35-page “Zine” to audience members, rather than the traditional slim playbill. With its extended reflections from Director Jordan Laffrenier, a lengthy interview with Harris, historical perspectives — and even a lexicon of the psychological and philosophical terminology Slave Play engages with — this document isn’t pre-show reading. It’s post-show first aid.
You’ll need it.
Because Slave Play is a garish, violent act of confounding and complication. While the play earned 12 Tony nominations during its Broadway run and has been hailed as a revolutionary work, it is abrasively and entirely unsettling. It is both real and absurd, sensitive and satirical – and titillating and prurient, with its big black dildo and prolonged white nudity.
For me, it’s probably a little too clever for its own good — but before I go further, full disclosure: I write this as a middle-class white man (a “majoritarian,” to appropriate one of the play’s arch terms), aware that I don’t stand apart from the play’s subject matter. My act of processing Slave Play is inextricably bound to that identity. So no need to say this, but I will say it anyways: your mileage — with my review, as with the play itself — will vary.
Slave Play unfolds one story across three startlingly different acts, each of which feels like its own tonally conflicted universe. We move from provocative-absurd antebellum role-play in the first act to clinical-absurd psychosexual group therapy in the second act, and finally to a raw yet also absurd emotional-sexual confrontation in the third act. At the centre of the play are three interracial couples struggling through race-rooted relationship challenges. A riveting Sophia Walker and Gord Rand, as Kaneisha and her white British husband Jim, navigate the production’s most challenging and varied emotional terrain. Sébastien Heins brings an inarticulate intensity to mixed-race Phillip, opposite Amy Rutherford’s wonderfully Karen-like Alana. And Kwaku Okyere (outstanding) and Justin Eddy chart gay couple Gary and Dustin’s volatile path with precise emotional calibration. Guiding these couples through their psychological minefields are the deliciously earnest — yet ridiculous, yet insightful, yet self-absorbed — facilitators Tea (Beck Lloyd) and Patricia (Rebecca Applebaum). Each performer executes with precision the wild tonal swings within their roles, embodying characters who are at once archetypes, stereotypes, and deeply individual souls.
Harris’s central thesis emerges through this formal and character chaos: intergenerational racial trauma is so deeply imprinted that it inhabits the body, tattoos the soul, and shapes our desires in ways we can barely comprehend. And this same trauma also inhibits us … from naming it, listening to it, following it, or even allowing it to be examined … in ways that are at once deeply personal, genetically inherited, and socially constructed.
This multi-faceted idea refracts in countless directions … which are simultaneously explored and mocked. For Slave Play (in keeping with the dual meaning of its title) refuses to address its taboo-confronting, definition-defying subject matter in a recognizably linear or emotionally singular fashion. This is a play that needs to have its cake and eat it (out), too. It satirizes its own core — first through absurd BDSM scenarios, then through over-taxonomized therapy sessions, and finally in Jim’s gratuitous “cockabout”. And yet … all of these moments are also shot through with lacerating, deadly serious howls of anguish and insight.
It’s complicated. I found it hard to process these primal cries from within the mockery and absurdity of Slave Play’s theatrical frame. Our sexual relationships and our race relations and the way they intertwine in the play are fraught… tortured…and in many ways ridiculous. But perhaps the laughter doesn’t trivialize. Perhaps it locates the underlying dissonance and violence, and shows us the difficulty of naming and addressing them, and our possibly doomed, but essential need to try.
And Slave Play demands this effort of us. The play and production positively revel in their provocations: needling us unrelentingly, and forcing us to unpack not just our visceral reactions to the titillating schlock, the endless talk, and yes, that bobbing cock — but to interrogate and unpack the act of unpacking itself. We all bring our baggage – personal, racial, generational – and by the final blackout, our mental space, like the bed center-stage, is liable to be a mess.
When the show’s final, freighted line lacerates the air — landing somewhere between benediction and indictment — it’s a mercy to have that Zine waiting in our hands. But first aid, like theatre itself, can only dress the wounds. The underlying condition demands more radical surgery.
Slave Play continues at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre until October 26. Tickets are available at canadianstage.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
