Playwright Jeremy O. Harris Is Blowing Up Broadway
Playwrights rarely become household names. But there's a good chance Jeremy O. Harris could be on his way to that kind of fame. He's 29 and still a student at the Yale School of Drama, but his Off-Broadway debut, the provocative Slave Play, opened last fall in New York to the kind of rapturous attention that a writer would happily wait a lifetime for. He quickly followed it up in March with a dazzling new production called “Daddy” and is now being hailed as one of the most exciting new voices, theatrical or otherwise, of his generation.
Set on an American plantation in the Old South, Slave Play is a raw exploration of race and sex and features an utterly disorienting twist. The play asks viewers (specifically white straight viewers) to stew in their own privilege and good intentions. It assaults assumptions, yes, but also challenges the pleasant norms of the theatergoing experience. For Harris, that's the point.
He and I met recently, on Broadway, to take in a kinder, gentler sort of production—The Ferryman, a box-office smash and heavy favorite to win big at this year's Tony Awards. He wants to know what everyone's excited about. In the Sunday-matinee crowd, Harris stands out, not only because he's six feet five inches and wearing a pink knit hat pulled over his thick braids but because he is one of just a few black people in the audience. “Some people criticized me because they thought I wrote a play for white people,” Harris says of Slave Play, which closed in January. “But my audience looked much different than this.” For all the raves The Ferryman has earned, the three-hour-plus saga of an Irish family fails to capture Harris, who admits that by the first intermission, he may have dozed off. “I'm trying to figure out what keeps people here,” he says.
Unlike with plays like The Ferryman, Harris hopes audiences sometimes have a hard time with his work. He wants his viewers to be uncomfortable, angry, turned on—he wants them to feel something strongly, even if that thing is hatred. For example, “Daddy,” starring Alan Cumming, tells the story of a young black queer artist who finds a sugar daddy in a rich white art collector. “It became very fun to associate a sort of black psychic regression with whiteness,” he says. In “Daddy,” whiteness and masculinity are not goals but corrupters. “In our culture, one has to move as close to masculinity and as close to whiteness as possible in order to catapult you up. And that is something that is highly critique-able.”
His prodigious start notwithstanding, Harris didn't exactly set out to be a playwright. He grew up in Martinsville, Virginia—raised by a struggling single mother who worked three jobs to send him to private school—and arrived at DePaul University eager to study acting. But even with the plays he admired, it was difficult for him to find roles and narratives that weren't straight and white. He realized he'd have to write them himself. He drew inspiration from the fashion, art, and music scenes and resolved to create a theatrical voice that would resonate with anybody who could relate to his experience—black, queer, artsy, southern, fashionista. “And at the end of the day,” he says, “having that person in the theater is better than having another old white person.”
Jaya Saxena is a GQ contributor.
A version of this story originally appeared in the April 2019 issue with the title "Meet the Playwright Who's Blowing Up Broadway."
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Micaiah Carter
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Grooming by Barry White at barrywhitemensgrooming.com
Set design by Two Hawks Young
