This September, Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play makes its national premiere at Canadian Stage, where I’m associate artistic director. In preparation for directing the play, which opened on Broadway in 2019, I spent one week this summer in Richmond, Virginia, and visited the plantations near where it’s set.
This essay is my attempt to talk about Slave Play without talking about Slave Play, because it’s one of those shows that’s best experienced when you go in knowing nothing at all.
My introduction to Richmond came long before setting foot there. I remember my mother explaining racial segregation to me after revealing that my grandfather (white) and my grandmother (Black) used to get kicked out of restaurants in Hamilton, Ontario — and she brought up the case of Loving vs. Virginia. Too young to understand, I took away the idea that somewhere in this southern place called Richmond, love stood up against the state that tried to contain it, and won.
When I think of my grandparents’ story now, I wonder what it meant for them to hold each other’s histories during times they were refused a table and asked to leave, to confront not only segregation but all that came before it, to hold each other and see pain inflicted and strength endured, to hold each other against the violence of history as they wrote mine. History is not neutral; it arrives through a series of inheritances, conquests, resistances, and betrayals. We don’t choose what we inherit, nor can we understand how it lives in us, but it is there and comes out in ways we don’t always expect, including the ways that we love.
In preparation for directing Slave Play, I spoke with psychoanalyst and therapist Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou, author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, in which she writes about her profound interest in Slave Play. I asked about generational trauma: Is it epigenetic? What gets passed down, and how?
She believes history lives in our bodies and is transmitted through relations of care: A white mother whose child explores a pediatrician’s waiting room may see, and expect others to see, her child’s curiosity as something exciting, while a Black mother may worry that it will be seen as an intrusion of privacy and property. The way each of these mothers may say “come back here” has a different level of anxiety, and that contrast is threaded through history and with history.
When I think of my own parents, I can feel an inevitable truth that is carried and passed down. The weight of history lives in their bodies: in their tight clutch whenever I leave their homes, the insistence in their eyes as they tell me I matter; their fear, their anxiety, my mother’s plea to not go to America right now, not go to Virginia right now, and in all the ways they told me and still tell me to get back here.
***
At a restaurant in Richmond, a few miles north of where Slave Play takes place, a few miles east of where my great-grandfather was enslaved, I meet a warm local couple who’ve been living together in Richmond for over two decades.
We talk about the city’s recent history of redlining and gentrification; how the life expectancy of a Black person living in Richmond is 20 years lower than a white person; the way the municipal government has raised property taxes in order to push Black communities out of the historic neighbourhood where my AirBnB is located.
We discuss the confederate monuments that once lined Monument Avenue, blocks away from the restaurant we’re at, but which the city tore down after protests in 2020. “It’s difficult for me to explain, and my mind has changed on this subject many times, but I want to see the monuments,” I tell the couple. “My great-grandfather escaped slavery, he fought in the Civil War — I don’t want history erased, I want to confront it.”
I spoke without a full awareness of what these monuments were. “You can’t understand the imposing scale and presence of these sculptures,” one of them responds.
What I understand now, that I couldn’t understand when I spoke to the couple, was that the sculptures were larger than life — that they weren’t erected during the Civil War, but during Jim Crow, to intimidate Black Americans: White supremacy physically towered over the city. Confronting history was recognizing history and literally tearing it down.
They show me pictures of the monuments, taken just weeks prior to them being removed. It’s the photos that undo me.
The sculptures are covered in the very root of Black North American expression: Four hundred years of pain translated and transformed into murals and graffiti. The photos show songs of love and protest being performed in front of them — people dancing and chanting. These artists, through their art, pry open the monuments, reveal everything these sculptures have witnessed, everything they attempted to maintain: centuries of slavery, decades of Jim Crow, generations of racist housing policies. History they claim to honour as they repeat.
This is the part of Black expression that cannot be replicated (no matter how many times Elvis, Adele, or Bruno Mars are awarded for attempting to do so). The part of Black expression that has a cultural stronghold over most of the world. The reason the music we listen to is closer to the music the enslaved chanted than the enslavers, or that the food we deem American is spiced and prepared to mimic that of the captured.
“This is the music of a people who survived, who not only won’t stop but can’t be stopped,” New York Times critic Wesley Morris wrote in an article about the appropriation of Black music. “Four hundred years ago, more than 20 kidnapped Africans arrived in Virginia. They were put to work and put through hell. Twenty became millions, and some of those people found — somehow — deliverance in the power of music.” The voice that we use to deliver is a “cry of ancestry,” Morris wrote, delivered from (and delivering) each generation. It is all the ways we speak into the past and the future when we sing “I’m Coming Home.”
The visual artist Kehinde Wiley, whose work is a notable example of how art can play with history and deepen its contemporary meaning, has made a name for himself by repositioning Black youth within the European tradition of power and status. In Richmond, Wiley responded to the self-aggrandizing monuments with a monument of his own, “Rumors of War.” His monument, commissioned by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, was originally meant to be in conversation with a neighbouring monument of Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart.
Wiley’s vision molds an African-American equestrian with dreadlocks, torn jeans, and Nikes. Through this depiction, he commemorates the African-American youth who continue to be lost to social and political struggles in America.
The sculpture of J.E.B. Stuart was torn down one year after “Rumors of War” went up. Though the confederate statue has fallen, the Black child depicted in Wiley’s sculpture continues to hold his ground. To me, “Rumors of War” is a monument that could never be large enough. It holds our history and our present in ways that are made both obvious and less obvious by viewing. It takes history and restages it, in ways that are confronting.
I’ve seen something similar happen in theatre. Black playwrights have revolutionized the form by interrogating, remixing, and exploding history in provocative, genre-defying, and revisionist ways: Obaaberima by Tawiah M’Carthy, An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, blood.claat by d’bi.young anitafrika, Father Comes Home From the Wars by Suzan-Lori Parks, Sal Capone by Omari Newton, Insurrection by Robert O’Hara, Oraltorio by Motion, Funnyhouse of a Negro by Adrienne Kennedy, Shakespeare’s Nigga by Joseph Jomo Pierre, and, of course, Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris. The plots are rarely linear, but history is always present, and the fragments are revealing. These plays ask us to work through history, process history, to acknowledge history even though it can never be exorcised. These plays ask us to do something with the history we inherit. They don’t depict perfect pictures of what can never be depicted: They use history, write it into the present, and make audiences see it in new ways.
***
On my Virginia plantation tours, each guide acknowledges the wealthy white families who lived there, the architecture, and how the plantation functions now (a couple of them are wedding venues). The guides claim their plantations to be haunted as if a matter of fact, but the further in the state I travel from Richmond, the less the acknowledgement of the enslaved. For context, the population of Richmond is almost 50 per cent Black. The rest of Virginia? Well, the rest of Virginia is not that.
On the tour that’s the furthest away from Richmond, the guide calls the enslaved people who lived there “servants” because “that is how they were referred to at the time,” and when someone asks if the family who occupied the plantation owned slaves, the guide quickly replies that “everyone in the south owned slaves.” Surely the enslaved didn’t own themselves.
I tell this tour guide I’m in town to find the plantation my great-grandfather was on. She tells me they have a board member with that name. Neither of us speak. We both understand what this likely means.
When people ask me how Slave Play will translate to a Canadian audience, I think about our distance from Richmond as a metaphor. How in both my Jamaican roots (paternal) and my Black American roots (maternal) there were slaves, and how this history is carried in many Canadian families but is rarely acknowledged, and yet — it is not a history that was, but a history that is ever-present, a history that all North American life is based on.
Returning to Toronto, the question I’m asked most frequently is: What did it feel like to be on those plantations? To sit on the lawn of the master’s house? To run my hands along the indent left by the hands of the young Black men and children who built it? To sit in the chairs that are used now to witness vows of love in sickness and in health, in good times and bad? To look at the tide of the James River and want to swim, to want to swim faster, to want to swim to be free?
***
Slave Play is above all else a love story. “All the plays I’ve written so far have been stories in and around love,” said Jeremy O. Harris last year. “Slave Play [is] about the impossibility of loving blind of history and also about how to navigate the fact of power in the context of the stories that are written upon us because of things we cannot control.”
Thinking of my great-grandfather now, I imagine him standing at the altar, face to face with my great-grandmother in Hamilton, sometime after the war he fought for our freedom. She was white, a European immigrant. What did they see when they looked into each other’s eyes? What was their power dynamic? What did they vow to each other? What does it mean to hold someone’s history?
Since reading Slave Play, I’ve asked every romantic partner whether or not they experience a racial dynamic between us in the bedroom. No one has given the same answer.
What is it that I am asking them to acknowledge in these scenarios?
Who is it that I am asking them to hold?
What does it mean to hold someone’s history?
In every decade of my life I have been yelled at, numerous times, by white strangers. On one occasion, a white person cut me in line; when I politely let them know I was waiting, they screamed at me and threw fries in my face. An onlooker caught the incident on their camera phone, and said to me after: “I never thought I’d witness this in real life.” On more than one occasion, I have been called the N-word. In every instance, I have wondered, as I stare at their red faces, “What is it that lives in you, and lives in me, that makes you think you are allowed to do this?”
As a child, I twice had a rope tied around my neck. Once, on a school playground, the other kid simply wanted to play a game where we reenacted history. My mother pulled me out of the school three weeks later. I still remember the way that she hugged me that day.
What does it mean to hold someone?
In Sexuality Beyond Consent, Saketopoulou writes about the myth that trauma can be healed, how this myth has been commercialized and capitalized on. To her, trauma is something that forever changes the body, and when we acknowledge this, it becomes less about how we deal with or repair trauma and more about what we do with trauma. “Trauma,” she argues, “needs to circulate, it needs to be revisited.”
Slave Play is an example of what we can do with trauma. It is not a play about healing, it’s a play about doing, about wanting, about feeling. It’s a play that is meant to challenge — that acknowledges painful experiences are sometimes the most transformational. It’s a play that asks its audiences to give as much as they receive. To laugh out loud fully. To learn nothing that they don’t already know. To hold history, to feel what has been written on your body, to cry, to savour, to love, to find perspective in the fantasy that is theatre, to work within the fantasy, to act and react, to see more fully, to see, to see and be seen.
“Who am I to hold your past against you… I [just] hope that you see this through, I hope that you see this true.” — Rihanna
Slave Play runs from September 27 to October 19 at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre. Tickets are available here.
Canadian Stage is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Jordan Laffrenier
Jordan Laffrenier is an award-winning director, dramaturg, producer, and educator. Jordan is currently the associate artistic director of Canadian Stage and Prime Mover Theatre Company and the former artistic producer of Theatre Sheridan.
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