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I first saw Jeremy O. HarrissSlave Playat New York Theater Workshop last December.
At the same time, the playwright hasfielded intense online backlashfrom parts of the black community.
For the shows Broadway transfer, the Playbill includes a new cautionary epigraph by the writer Morgan Parker.
Its called A Note on Your Discomfort, and it begins, This might hurt.
So what follows is a conversation.
This time around, I saw the play with Taylor Barfield, a dramaturg and theater-maker from Baltimore.
Taylor Barfield:I deeply feel that.
:Exactly it leaves you in an ongoing feedback loop inside your own brain.
And, at least for me, doing a lot of second-guessing of my own impulses.
Or does it avoid prescription?
:I think lack of clarity is exactly right for this play.
It induces that symptom that the characters talk about alexithymia, the inability to describe ones own feelings.
:Yes, it does!
:For me, Ive always seen this play as a scientists bench.
:Its the scientific researchthe digging into the psychethat leads to a reckoning.
Its also what allows Harris to toggle back and forth between comedy and the very-not-funny so quickly.
We laugh at it, but the play doesnt mock it.
How to care for another person.
Something cant be rebuilt if we keep pretending it isnt broken in the first place.
:I agree with the sadness and I still dont feel like I have any concrete answers.
Acknowledgment is a step that many Americans, both black and white, wont make.
Theyll deny, deny, deny until they feel good.
Last night, I found myself continuously going back to this quote by the playwright Carlyle Brown.
And were always working the narrative so were coming out to being the good people.
Were not a very self-reflective culture.
Without that, theres not even a modicum of chance to move forward.
:Ha, that should be the new tagline for criticism: I think about self-reflection a lot.
:Well, yes, exactly!
I think public self-reflection is actually one way of describing the job.
Because criticism is actually always, under the surface, self-criticism.
Youre interrogating yourself and your assumptions through the lens of a piece of art.
But it makes an eerie kind of sense to me.
T.B.:Woof.
To quoteThe Good Place, I like to think of myself as pre-successful.
There are these narratives and actions associated with blackness and whiteness that prevent us individually from self-reflection.
:Yes, a tangle and not a hierarchy.
I think this is why the phrase checking your privilege sometimes bothers me.
I canspeakas a Woman, but as a White Person, Id better keep quiet.
Straight White Men had better keep the absolute quietest.
:I think this goes back to language and how its deployed and from where.
Somehow, its been reduced in practice to the dynamic you describe: I better not say anything.
Listening is hard work.
Thats why they called it active listening back in the day.
I think it gets even harder to listen the closer you get to trauma.
S.H.:Yes.
Straining for the signal inside a lot of static.
Kaneisha describes it best in the last third of the play.
:Right the constant dull roar in the back of your head that sharpens up horribly in certain moments.
The presence of ghosts.
:The presence of your ancestors in the walls, in the ground, and in your body.
They are and they arent.
:I know youve got to go!
And that this isnt a conversation that has any sort of end.
Slave Playis at the Golden Theatre through January 19.
