Reviewed by James Karas
Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris is now running at the Berkeley Theatre, Toronto in a production by Canadian Stage. Before I start my review, it is necessary to make a few preliminary remarks.
The program cover shows a black hand holding up a half cantaloupe whose seeds and centre contents give the impression that it is intended to represent a pudendum. You are forewarned that the play has a great deal to do with raw sexual matters including very salty language.
SPOILER ALERT: If you have never seen the play, you may wish not to read this review because of necessity I will disclose facts that may spoil the shocking discover half-way through the performance. The shock that you will get is worth the trouble of approaching the production in ignorance.
The first scene of the play takes place in a large plantation in Virginia, a slave-holding state before the Civil War. It involves Jim (Gord Rand) and Kaneisha (Sophia Walker) a beautiful black slave. Jim tells us that he is only her supervisor and not the owner of the plantation and should be addressed as Mister and not as Master. He carries a whip and notices Kaneisha moving her hips provocatively. He is sexually attracted to her and she may well be trying to attract him but with him wielding a whip and threatening to strike her we cannot be sure. In any event, the two engage in explicit (simulated, of course) coitus and we are not sure to what extent it is consensual or rape.
The scene ends with Kaneisha on all fours and Jim thrusting wildly from behind. She asks him to call her Negress and says she loves what he is doing. What is going on?
The next scene
takes place in the brightly lit boudoir (as compared to the dark light of the
first scene) of Alana or Madame MacGregor (Amy Rutherford) the wife of the
plantation owner. She is in her four-poster bed, dressed in a sexually
provocative dress, fanning herself. She is in heat. She calls Phillip (Sebastien
Heins), her butler. He is formally dressed, a cultured mulatto gentleman and a talented
violinist.
She wants something from Phillip and at first asks him to play the violin for her. Eventually, she takes out a huge dildo and I will stop with that scene right here.
We are still on the MacGregor Plantation and meet Dustin (Justin Eddy) a white indentured servant and Gary (Kwaku Okyere), a black, neatly dressed slave who oversees Dustin. They are gay and engage in a physical altercation that ends in intense coitus.
So far so good but then Patricia (Rebecca Applebaum) and Tea (Beck Lloyd), two therapists, take over and everything changes. The three couples appear seated in a therapy session today. The episodes we saw were scripted and the therapists watched the three couples act out their scripts and are about to examine what they witnessed in the three encounters and get the reaction of the couples.
I could not quite figure out what is going on. The therapists seem like recent graduates of some sort who speak in jargon, give evidence of incompetence and I am not sure if the play is not giving us a satire of whatever they are supposed to be doing.
The couples’ reactions were different and they did not see the farcical artificiality of the exercise or purported therapy. Aside, perhaps, from Jim’s reaction, they took the exercise seriously. Alana found the skit liberating and she did as Madame MacGregor what she could not do as as Alana.
The therapists call their method Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy to help black partners achieve satisfactory coitus with their white partners. But the couples do have sexual and racial problems that they may have masked or tolerated that the therapy sessions bring to the fore.
I will not summarize all the reactions of the couples to the scripted play-acting but comment on the final scene between Jim and Kaneisha. They are in their bedroom and they are the modern couple but they have not discarded the play-acting supposedly in the MacGregor Plantation. Jim has the whip of the first scene. Kanisha is packing to leave him and we see a lengthy emotional outburst that represents acting at a supreme level that left me floored.
She recalls scenes of love and tenderness, and the unfairness of their relationship. She screams that Jim does not listen to her to her needs, to her body’s needs. Her screams reach levels of searing emotional intensity that are simply unforgettable.
For all that, the end of the play is ambiguous and I will not say more about it.
The other actors do not reach the stunning performance of Sophia Walker but there is no doubt about their superb acting. Except for the therapists, they play two roles and they must go from slave-era Virgina with Southern accents to modern speech and uncomfortable confessions of relations, especially sexual ones.
Director Jordan
Loffrenier does outstanding work in stickhandling the emotional complexities of
the characters and the play in general. It is a play that must be seen and examined
many times to get to its soul.
_____________________________
SAVE PLAY by Jeremy O. Harris continues
until October 26, 2925, at the Berkeley St. Theatre, 26
Berkeley St. Toronto, Ont. https://www.canadianstage.com/
James Karas is the Senior Editor, Culture, of The Greek Press, Toronto
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