What Slave Play Writer Jeremy O. Harris Is Listening to Right Now

Jeremy O. Harris is riding high as one of New York theater’s most exciting new voices. The 30-year-old playwright’s darkly comedic drama Slave Play opened on Broadway earlier this month, making him the youngest black male writer to present on theater’s biggest stage. A provocative exploration of race and sex, Slave Play digs into sensitive cultural conversations and unearths repressed traumas; its revelations are nothing short of profound.

Harris wrote Slave Play while getting his MFA at the Yale School of Drama, and he graduated just this spring. The piece that got him into the program, Daddy, debuted off-Broadway in March. Beyond the stage, he served as a consultant on HBO’s Euphoria and ended up selling a pilot to the network. Needless to say, it’s been a whirlwind few years since the self-described music nerd wrote his first play, 2017’s Xander Xyst, Dragon: 1, which included references to witch house (and Pitchfork).

“Music is one of the foundational principles of how I move through my day,” Harris tells me, and this is quickly apparent in Slave Play. Rihanna’s “Work” looms especially large: The song torments one character as the expression of her obsessive-compulsive disorder, and its lyrics “nuh body touch me you nuh righteous” hover atop the set. “Multi-Love” by Unknown Mortal Orchestra soundtracks an erotic power struggle, and when an antebellum mistress demands her slave perform a “spiritual” on the violin, he launches into Ginuwine’s “Pony.” (When Slave Play ran off-Broadway last winter, the song was R. Kelly’s “Ignition (Remix).” As Harris explains, it was chosen to “articulate something about those characters‘ social and cultural unawareness.”)

These days, Harris typically begins his mornings with Lana Del Rey’s “Fuck it I love you,” Kelsey Lu’s “Foreign Car,” or Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe,” depending on his mood. “They all speak to one part of my identity, which is sort of a romantic, Southern dreamer,” he explains. “All three of them ease you into worlds they build super slowly, and they have an underlying ease that also leans into a very expressed sensuality.” These voices also channel strong memories of his childhood in Virginia. “Having a lady tell me a story about love lost or love built reminds me so much of working in my mom’s salon. All I heard there were women telling stories about the men they were dating, had dated, would’ve dated, could’ve dated, didn’t want to date,” he says. “It’s deeply Freudian, and it all goes back to my mom somehow. But I think that’s the only way I can make sense of my day.”

Below, Harris talks more about “Ode to Billie Joe” and shares two albums he‘s had on repeat.

Bobbie Gentry: “Ode to Billie Joe” (1967)

“Ode to Billie Joe” contains so many details that are hiding some sort of yearning or connection that this boy either didn’t fulfill or could have fulfilled. There’s so much mystery there, and I think it’s exciting to start your day recognizing that mystery. There’s nothing certain about where you’re going to go in your day.

I so often get lost in new music that I forget to remind myself what made it possible. Who but Bobbie Gentry would do a five-minute song where details as small as passing the biscuits build the dramatic action? It’s a full song of showing versus telling. It may be a better short story than anything Raymond Carver wrote.

One of my favorite moments in the last couple years was Rihanna doing that Tame Impala cover. Artists covering other artists gives everyone a different ear and respect for the craft of writing songs. I wonder when people are going to start covering Bobbie Gentry. Someone like Kelela, Kelsey Lu, or Lana Del Rey doing a Bobbie Gentry cover album would be so special. I think it would make everyone step their game up a little bit.

Various Artists: Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death (Original Cast Recording, 1971)

I grew up learning about the Western canon of theater, especially the classics. Then I started doing deep dives on the internet and finding out about all these really exciting black plays, like the works of Adrienne Kennedy. When I was talking about this with [playwright] Michael R. Jackson, he told me that in 1972, Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death was nominated for Best Musical over Jesus Christ Superstar. [Playwright and composer] Melvin Van Peebles put all of the American ghetto onto the Broadway stage. A lot of people have said it’s the first rap musical, but it’s so deeply poetic and there are so many different modes of rhythm-building and harmonizing and melodics, it feels beyond that. It’s like if Alice Coltrane made a rap album; it’s super psychedelic. Yet you can’t buy a cast album on iTunes or see the full thing anywhere, really.

I see people online say, “Oh, this is a moment for black writers. They’re really killing it right now.” I’m like, “No, actually, I feel like we’re on The Good Place and we’re hitting reset,” because I’ll read a play that was done in 1935 by some black person and it’s like, Whoa, black people have been on some really psycho badass shit. As difficult as it has been for black bodies to maintain autonomy inside of white supremacy, in the space of music and sports, our contributions are undeniable even when they’ve been appropriated. The history [of those fields] reminds us consistently, whereas in musical theater, I don’t think that happens as much. Maybe if we had a more rarefied space or a more fervent relationship to reviving the work of black artists of the past, we’d be seeing the type of black theater as far-flung and creative as Outkast is in the space of music.

Julius Eastman: Unjust Malaise (2005)

Much like the characters in Slave Play, sometimes a song gets stuck in my head for a long time, inside some nerve ending. I can’t get it out of me until I listen to the song a bunch of times. When I first listened to Unjust Malaise, the first song, “Stay on It,” was with me for probably three months. Full films came to me from this seven-minute composition; images flooded my brain of little kids running through a field and finding each other. I was coming to an understanding about who [American minimalist composer] Julius Eastman was and how his music functioned inside of my body while I was moving through a very hallowed New England academic institution—where I felt like my black, gay body was at odds with its white, straight, patriarchal history.

Much like Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, it’s interesting that [Eastman] had to be whisper-networked to me from another black artist. That really, really frustrated me. So my practice is to not whisper about Julius but to yell about him all the time. His music contains universes, and the digressions, subversions, and surprises inside his music do everything to me. It feels like a great identity-marker for me. When I put on Julius Eastman, it’s me standing in my power, like I’m a gay guerrilla, I’m an evil nigger, don’t touch me. I started a Raya profile and picked his song “Evil Nigger” for my profile. Hopefully Julius can be a beacon that you’re not alone—a beacon that he didn’t really have, because he was unfortunately left alone and met a very untimely and incredibly sad death.

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork