The Toronto Theatre Review: Slave Play at Canadian Stage
By Ross
Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play doesn’t ask for your comfort, but it does demand your participation and your attention. His confrontation with race, sexuality, and power between couples is whip-smart, volatile, and wildly alive. The charged and often comical drama rolls and rides through the legacy of historical racial violence and sexual politics, daring us to watch without flinching. In the Canadian Stage production, directed with sharp tactical precision by Jordan Laffrenier (CCPA’s Ride the Cyclone), the fascinating play presents a series of difficult, necessary questions about race and intimacy that must be wrestled with deep into the night over a few stiff drinks with friends you trust. Even after three viewings — from its explosive premiere at New York Theatre Workshop to its incendiary Broadway transfer, where it earned twelve Tony nominations — Slave Play still unsettles, provokes, and surprises.
It’s a complicated, direct satirical crack of the whip, reflecting back into our laps the intersections of slavery, power, desire, and class. Harris, who also wrote the divinely intriguing Daddy, finds the different shades of rhythm and music between attraction and aggression, the push-pull of privilege and pain. It’s all “work, work, work, work, work” when the compelling Sophia Walker (Shaw’s The House That Will Not Stand) as the beautifully frustrated Kaneisha finds her groove and allows it to take over her body sweepingly. “Whatcha mean, Mister Jim?” she teases her whip-carrying master-slash-husband, played with riveting complexity and duality by Gord Rand (“Peak Everything”). And we can’t help but be intrigued because what Walker brings to the floor is something beyond amazing.
From that first encounter, we’re undeniably caught in Harris’s combustible and disturbingly erotic world. Laffrenier’s production enticingly captures the raw humour and razor-sharp discomfort that made the play infamous, but it also deepens the emotional pulse. This Slave Play isn’t about provocation for its own sake; it’s about the electric charge that comes from watching people wrestle with the internal structures that built them. It’s sexy, scary, and sometimes absurd, but it’s never safe. The production’s daring stance mirrors Harris’s own: every visual and sonic choice feels like another layer of excavation — of memory, myth, and carnal desire.
Throughout, we’re kept deliciously off-balance. What exactly are we watching? A re-enactment? A fantasy? A therapy session gone rogue? The play constantly shifts beneath our feet, forcing us to question our responses as the power dynamic flips, burns, and reforms. In one moment, we laugh nervously at the “processing” language spilling from the mouths of Teá and Patricia, played with brilliant tonal control by Beck Lloyd (Stratford’s Grand Magic) and Rebecca Applebaum (“Paying For It”), and in the next, we’re wincing under their watchful eye as the psychoanalytic jargon crashes into centuries of trauma and resistance. Harris never tells us how to feel; he just keeps turning the mirror, and with every reflection, we see something new and unnerving in ourselves.
Visually, Laffrenier’s Slave Play vibrates with an insanely hypnotic tension. The inventive scenic design by Gillian Gallow (Shaw Festival’s Major Barbara) places us in a plantation dreamscape that morphs and melts under Daniel Bennett’s feverish lighting (Grand Theatre’s Cabaret). Rachel Forbes’s costumes (CS’s Fairview) move fluidly between periods, while Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound and original music (CS’s Is God Is) give us the literal crack of the whip, echoing deep inside the subconscious. The movement and intimacy direction by Anisa Tejpar (Crow’s Earworm) is both confrontational and careful; sensual yet strategic, guiding the actors through territory that feels authentic and genuinely dangerous. Inside all this artistry, Slave Play frames a performance environment where the actors can bare themselves completely, both emotionally and physically.
Deep inside the folds of this fantastical play-therapy session, where there are no wrong or right responses to the presenting problems, some significant interpersonal dilemmas need to be addressed. And each is magnificently embodied by a very game cast that found their way into something even deeper and stronger than they signed up for. Day four, it seems, digs in to murky territory, bashing their messed-up conflicts in such a heartfelt way that even a few bent-over deep breathing exercises can’t quite get them back into pre-Starbucks, ship-shape clarity and unity of purpose.
As directed with a heightened sexual arc of precision by Laffrenier, Harris attempts to rip apart history by shedding a forceful light on race, gender, and sexuality in 21st-century America. He does this by introducing us to several hotly contested and complicated couples struggling for connection across a divide. “I’m in charge, funny white man,” declares Gary, played with magnetic intensity by the always magnificent Kwaku Okyere (Tarragon/Modern Times’s Craze), to his lover Dustin, portrayed with fragile, fascinating restraint by Justin Eddy (Stratford’s Salesman in China). Their scenes crackle with the tension of love curdled by hierarchy, of tenderness corroded by systemic difference. When Dustin and Gary have their own individualized meltdown moment, the stances of “off-whiteness” and aggression push hard, smacking us upside down with a conflicted idea of love and distress. Licking at the boots of love and subservient behavior, these two deliver most cautiously one of the most personally connective moments for this audience member, and it’s unwrapped as perfectly as one could ever hope for.
“I’m not sure, Mistress,” says the strong, handsome, and gifted Phillip, played provocatively by the smartly dense and desirous Sébastien Heins (House&Body/Crow’s Measure for Measure) to the heated Alana, portrayed magnificently by the exacting and irreplaceable Amy Rutherford (Soulpepper’s What the Constitution Means to Me). Rutherford almost steals the show in her duality of being, but it’s their equally fraught dynamic that is the power, punishment, play, and pleasure of the piece, all bleeding into one. Ultimately, these four actors deserve their own coda, a deeper resolution that the script doesn’t quite provide. They are ultimately left a little out in the cold after self-combusting like a stepped-on landmine before our very eyes. Still, they make the chaos feel essential and universal, pushing the show’s psycho-sexual warfare into real emotional terrain.
If the therapy structure starts to feel oppressive or repetitive in its final stretch, the emotional honesty and the physical vulnerability onstage keep it alive and crackling. Slave Play, even in its most convoluted moments, never lets us off the hook; not as spectators, nor as citizens. It asks whether empathy can exist when history keeps returning as a fetishized performance. It wonders what healing looks like when the wound is built into the foundation by years of racist oppression and privilege.
In Toronto, that question lands differently. Inside the Berkeley Street Theatre, you could feel the audience leaning forward — aware of their position, and aware of the inward gaze. This isn’t just a U.S. story. Canada has its own house of mirrors, its own plantation ghosts, its own denial dressed up as liberal progress. Slave Play forces that reckoning forward, reflecting it back into our sensibilities and souls, whether we’re ready or not.
You’re making progress, Toronto. And it shows. But as Harris reminds us — and this production underscores with painful precision — the real work is just beginning. And the ride forward is ferociously fraught.
