A lot of sound and fury, signifying… something I’ve heard before.
Walking into the Canadian Stage production of Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, I was acutely aware of the demographics in the room. The marketing machine behind this show has been relentless, promising something “dangerous,” “risky,” and “explosive.” It positions itself as a grenade thrown into the lap of the establishment. And standing there—as white, middle-aged man with left-leaning politics and a working knowledge of Baldwin and Morrison—I couldn’t help but ask myself the question the play seemingly wants me to ask: Is this play even for me?
The answer, I suspect, is complicated. But the feeling I left with was surprisingly simple: Meh.
The premise is undeniably bold: three interracial couples undergo “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy” at the MacGregor Plantation. It is designed to be uncomfortable. It utilizes mirrors to force the audience to look at themselves; it utilizes silence and noise to unsettle. But there is a distinct difference between being provoking and simply aiming to provoke.
For the first act, I felt like I was watching a shock-value checklist being ticked off. Is it jarring to see sexualized power dynamics rooted in slavery played out on stage? Yes. Does it make your skin crawl? Absolutely. But shock wears off quickly when the substance underneath feels familiar. The play seems to rely on the assumption that the audience has never considered the intersection of race, sexuality, and power before.
I can appreciate, intellectually, that this is a piece of art that shape-shifts depending on who is sitting in the chair. I have no doubt that for a Black audience member, or a white woman, or someone in an interracial relationship, the frequency of this play might shatter the glass. In that sense, it succeeds as “Art”—it is demanding, it elicits a visceral response, and it refuses to let you remain passive. It forces you to confront your own voyeurism.
But speaking strictly from my own seat, the “danger” felt manufactured. As someone who tries to stay well-read and socially conscious, the themes Slave Play tackles—that the ghost of slavery haunts every interaction, that white liberalism often masks a fetishization of the “other,” that intimacy can be a battlefield of historical trauma—are not new revelations. They are the water we have been swimming in for years.
I expected the play to take these heavy, ugly realities and transmute them into something new, or at least offer a fresh vantage point. Instead, it felt mired in the very muck it claims to be exposing. It wallows in the trauma without necessarily pointing a way through or above it. It felt like an exercise in reiteration rather than exploration.
By the time the “therapy” session in the second act rolled around, dissecting the events of the first, I found myself checking my watch. The intellectual deconstruction of the events felt academic, almost like a Twitter thread come to life on stage. It was telling us what we should have felt, rather than letting us feel it.
If the goal was to make me feel white guilt, it missed the mark; mostly, I just felt a weary sense of déjà vu. Slave Play screams that it is radical, but stripped of the whips and the mirrors, it felt like a conversation we’ve been having for a very long time, just turned up to a deafening volume. It’s a play that demands you look at it, but I’m not sure it offers much to see that we haven’t seen before.
