Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play opened at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre on Wednesday night.  The TL:DR version of this review is that it’s raunchy, extremely funny and rather disturbing.  The more considered version contains spoilers so you might want to stop here if you are planning to see it soon.

The first act introduces us to three interracial couples, apparently in the Antebellum South. Slave Kaneisha is sweeping the floor of overseer Jim’s house.  She repeatedly asks why he doesn’t beat her for her lazy and lascivious “negress” ways while provocatively shaking her butt at him.  Eventually he throws her on a table and takes her roughly.  Mistress Alana is feeling the heat while her husband is away and demands to be entertained by her handsome mulatto manservant Philip.  It starts with him playing Beethoven on the violin and ends with her stripped to her lingerie buggering him with a giant black dildo apparently acquired from her mother. Gary is the negro chargehand  overseeing the white indentured servant Dustin.  After much to-ing and fro-ing, Dustin brings Gary to a climax by licking his boots.  These stories are skilfully interwoven and the humour, of which there’s lots, rather masks the implausibility of each story until the action is brought to an end by the two facilitators Teá and Patricia who appear from the back of the theatre.  End of Act 1.

You were suspecting it but now it’s explicit.  The sex scenes were fantasy role plays.  We are in day four of a therapy workshop for dysfunctional interracial couples held on a former plantation.  The couples have been selected to further Teá and Patricia’s research into “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy” and, maybe, solve their own problems though that seems secondary; especially to Patricia, who reminds me of the kind of academic physician who refers to patients as “research subjects”.

So the post fantasy “processing” begins.  It’s gruesome, embarrassing and uncomfortably funny.  JIm and Kaneisha are a well to do New York couple.  He’s an Oxbridge educated Brit and she’s an intelligent, assertive woman with issues about her ancestral past.  Jim repeatedly challenges the validity of the process eliciting streams of psychobabble from the facilitators.  Dustin keeps denying his rather obvious “whiteness” to Gary’s intense frustration.  Alana and Philip’s story is the weirdest.  They met on FetLife where Alana recruited Philip to “cuck” her in front of her husband.  He’s perfect for the role; a strapping, handsome, not very bright but well hung athlete.  The trouble starts when she leaves her husband.

It’s all very tense, very uncomfortable and gets close to spilling over into violence and no-one seems to be resolving anything though no doubt it’s a success as a research experiment.  It also remains very funny.  The final scene belongs to Jim and Kaneisha who do reach a rather surprising resolution.

Director Jordan Laffrenier does a fantastic job of balancing the comic and the deeply disturbing aided by an excellent cast.  The heaviest burden falls on Gord Rand playing Jim and Sophia Walker as Kaneisha.  Somehow they portray the ambiguity of their “real” and “fantasy” selves and just how uncomfortable they are as the latter even when throwing themselves into the roles.  Their opening scene is incredibly sexy and very, very wrong at the same time.  They also have to pull off the tricky final scene which they do very well.

Amy Rutherford and Sébastien Heins as Alana and Philip are excellent too.  It’s clear neither of their characters really get the process but the exuberance of their first act role playing and their rather lovable naivety during the debrief is quite affecting.  Its much the same with the Gary and Dustin of Kwaku Okyere and Justin Eddy though I’m not sure I really get the Justin character.  Beck Lloyd  as Teá manages to show some human connection with her lab rats while Rebecca Applebaum chillingly plays Patricia who couldn’t give a toss about people as long as they advance her career.

So there we have it.  It’s a play about race and sex, passion and power that delves into all the spaces and questions that we avoid in polite society in a deeply uncomfortable way.  But it still manages to be raunchy and extremely funny.  I haven’t laughed so much at a play in years.  It’s deeply subversive in the best possible way.

Slave Play runs at the Berkeley Street Theatre until October 26th.

Photo credits: Dahlia Katz