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by Jeremy O. Harris, directed by Jordan Laffrenier

Canadian Stage Company, Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto

October 1-November 2, 2025

Kaneisha: “When they brought us ova – y’all did try to tear it away from us. The truth of our bodies?”

Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play from 2018 is an audacious, deliberately provocative play about sex, race and power. Canadian Stage has given it an immaculate staging with the entire cast in top form. The company calls it “the most talked about play of the decade” (presumably the 2010s), but “most talked about” is not a wholly positive descriptor. Harris calls the play a “comedy of sorts” and, despite its weighty topics, the play is laugh-out-loud funny for most of its running time. By the end, though, you feel that Harris has brought up a host of important questions without providing answers to any of them. As an audience member, you have to decide how much this strategy of Harris’s matters to play that is so entertaining.

The play is divided into three acts. Canadian Stage inserts a single intermission between Acts 1 and 2. Act 1 is set on the MacGregor Plantation a few miles south of Richmond, Virginia. When we see a Black woman enter in a petticoated ankle-length shirt with her hair tied up in a kerchief sweeping the floor, we assume she is a slave. When a White man enters wearing boots and carrying a whip, we assume he is the master. Right from the start Harris asking us why we read these images this way, and right from the start he plays with our expectations. Snatches of songs by Rihanna and Drake burst in periodically to shake up our idea of when the action is occurring.

As we discover, the White man, Jim, is not the plantation owner but the overseer. Deliberately offending our sensibilities and confusing Jim, the Black woman, Kaneisha, can’t help but twerk in front of Jim. She claims it’s part of Africa that still controls her body. In a manner that is both outrageous and hilarious, Kaneisha makes it quite evident that she actually wants Jim to whip her, although the seemingly dim-witted Jim is too slow to pick this up.

In the big house of the plantation the owner’s White wife Alana, sitting on a big fourposter bed, is suffering from the heat, both external and internal. The temperature only rises when another plantation overseer, the handsome mulatto Phillip, enters to ask how he can help. In dialogue heavy with double entendres, we find that Phillip can help Alana but in a way we never expected.

Then in yet another part of the plantation, a Black overseer, Gary, is supervising the work of what Harris calls an “off-white” indentured servant named Dustin. If until now we had thought we were watching some campy version of sex play between races in the antebellum South, the too-modern names of these characters announce that the action must be taking place in the present. In a reverse of the Kaneisha-Jim relationship, here the Black man relishes his domination of the “off-white” worker, while the worker himself relishes his subjugation. Dustin’s fulfilling of Gary’s fetishistic desires leads Gary to the only orgasm any of the six plantation dwellers experiences.

When the scene cuts back to Jim and Kaneisha, they are finally having sex, but before Kaneisha can climax he calls out the safeword “Starbucks”. This shakes us disoriented into the present.

In Act 2 we discover the truth of what we have been seeing, namely that we have been watching three couples engaging in improvised role-play as part of therapy. Téa and Patricia, the two women observing the treatment, refer to it as “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy” (ASPT). Its purpose is to help Black partners overcome their anhedonia, which, in the context of the play, means to help them feel pleasure again with their White partners.

The first half of this act is extremely funny since Harris mercilessly satirizes the therapy-speak and performative empathy of Téa and Patricia. At one point after a particularly jargon-filled analysis, Phillip says he doesn’t understand half of what Téa said. Near the end of the act, Kaneisha, who gradually becomes the voice of reason in the play, states that neither Téa nor Patricia has a clue what they’re talking about. Besides this, we discover that their ASPT is part of a thesis the two are working on for Yale and is based on the role-playing that Téa and Patricia themselves did to get over subconscious dominant-submissive issues that they had in their own relationship. Thus, Téa and Patricia are hardly objective observers and are exploiting the three couples for their own purposes.

The entire goal of ASPT is for the non-White partner to bring the Black partner to orgasm. This happens with Dustin and Gary, but that fact doesn’t lead to harmony between them but anger and recrimination. Dustin complains that Gary was “too into” his role as overseer.

With Alana and Phillip everything seems fine until it dawns on Phillip that he resents Alana for considering him as only Black when he is actually half-Black and half-White. Why can’t Alana be turned on by him as who he really is?

Téa and Patricia view Jim and Kaneisha’s role-play as a failure. Indeed, the awakening for Kaneisha has nothing to do with ASPT except for noting that Jim hated the role-play whereas she enjoyed it. It is a piece that Jim has privately written during the therapy session that gives Kaneisha the insight she has been looking for. Jim says that he is a virus, and Kaneisha agrees that that is exactly what he is.

The problem is that having satirized how awkwardly the three couples engaged in role-play and having satirized how fraudulent ASPT is, Harris doesn’t give us any firm idea how to regard the three different results that the therapy session has elicited. The one successful result with Gary and Dustin leads to a fight. The result that comes from private communication between Jim and Kaneisha leads to a revelation most in line with the idea behind ASPT, namely that inherited racial trauma leads to sexual anhedonia. We might be able to say this is true except that Harris has presented the idea through so many layers of irony.

Act 3 focusses only on Jim and Kaneisha without having sought any resolution to the disruptions in the relationships of Phillip and Alana or Gary and Dustin. In a long speech in which Kaneisha speaks of seeing the demons in the walls of the big houses of Southern plantations, she tells Jim that he is a demon, whereupon their intimate relations lead to a reversal of their situation in Act 1, a twist that adds yet another layer of irony to the action that pulls the rug from under any theories we may have constructed to understand the action.

The idea that the play leads to no definitive conclusion but is really a house of mirrors is well captured by Gillian Gallow’s set. The walls, doors and floor are all reflective surfaces. Only the white moldings around the doors hint at particular period though that could be anywhere from the 18th century to the present. Rachel Forbes’s costumes for the Antebellum period are amusing in their deliberately overblown clichés.

Given the ultimate ambiguity of the text, director Jordan Laffrenier has drawn superlative performances from the entire cast. The characters we spend the most time with are Kaneisha and Jim. Sophia Walker is terrific in playing both the physical and verbal comedy of when Kaneisha is role-playing and in giving vehement expression to Kaneisha’s most serious thoughts when she is herself. It is an unusual demand to have an actor play both low comedy and earnest reflection in the same play, but Walker proves she easily can encompass both.

Gord Rand plays Jim, who is meant to be a Brit. In Act Rand brings out all the humour of someone uncomfortable with his role and Southern accent yet trying in spite of this to carry on. In Act 2 Rand, even when silent, makes us feel the extreme animosity Jim feels toward everything having to do with therapy, particularly with its repurposed vocabulary about “processing” and “unpacking” feelings. However, when we view Jim’s actions in Act 3, Rand clearly reveals a fierceness behind Jim’s calm façade that we did not suspect was there.

Harris makes Phillip and Alana the most purely comic of the three couples. Amy Rutherford has given us a solidly tragic version of the Southern belle in A Streetcar Named Desire. As Alana in Slave Play she gives an absolutely hilarious version of a similar sex-starved character complaining suggestively about how “hot” she is as she removes various items of clothing. Meanwhile, Sébastien Heins as Phillip acts as if he has no clue what the mistress of the house is talking about. She wants him to give her some “mulatto magic” by playing mulatto tunes on his violin, but all he wants to do is play Beethoven. Alana in real life is also comically clueless. Rutherford makes it seem that Alana doesn’t know what the therapy she signed up for is about or even when to speak during the group sessions.

Harris has given the actor playing Phillip an almost impossible task. When role-playing, Phillip seems cultured and clearly brighter than Alana. In real life Harris has Phillip appear like a dim-witted jock. It’s fun to see so intelligent an actor as Heins play a dunce, but there is no way to imagine how the dumb jock is also obsessed with playing Beethoven. It seems that Harris views Phillip more as a symbol than a real person combining the cliché linking sports with African-Americans and classical music with Europeans. Heins does his best, but when Phillip has his revelation, it feels like Harris, not Phillip is doing the talking.

Though the role-playing of Gary and Dustin is deemed successful it is almost comically fetishistic. In Act 2, however, Harris clearly wants us to take it seriously since it leads to manufactured blow-up between the two men. At the height of their argument both claim they are being “erased” by the other. Harris gives Gary a great speech about his wanting to be considered the “prize” for a change, a speech that Kwaku Okyere delivers with intense passion. Dustin accuses Gary of liking him because he regards him as White even though he is not White, but at the same time Dustin refuses to describe what exactly he is. Justin Eddy pours so much energy into Dustin that Eddy makes Dustin’s statements sound less contradictory than they are.

The second most amusing couple of the show are Beck Lloyd as Téa and Rebecca Applebaum as Patricia. Lloyd is a comic gem as Téa whom she makes so sickeningly earnest and professionally sincere you feel glad to have a chance to laugh. Applebaum plays Patricia as Téa’s loyal sidekick whose main role is to second any thoughts Téa may utter.

In his note on the text, Harris states that “This is a play about shades, colors as much as it's about race”. This should come as a surprise to all the critics who have treated the play as a depiction of the struggle only between Black and White. Harris has deliberately included the characters of Dustin and Patricia who were designated as Latinx in the original production in 2018 and are now played by two actors of Asian heritage. Similarly, he includes Phillip and Téa who are both intended as half White and half Black. Dustin and Patricia have encountered the difficulty of Black people regarding them as White and of White people ignoring their background. Phillip and Téa are able to pass as White which presents the difficulty of ignoring one half of who they are.

We know there is no scientific basis in the concept of race. Race is a construct. In Harris’s play four of the eight characters fit no simple black-or-white (pun intended) definition. I fact, his play as a whole fits no stable definition. Harris says, “Slave Play is a comedy of sorts. It should be played as such”. What the play does primarily is to provoke and to ask questions. Some may be unhappy that Harris provides only layers of irony and no answers. But it may be that Harris does this because he sees that there are only layers of irony.

In his note on the play, Harris says, “Everything in life is a performance”. Act 1 of the play shows us three couples trying their best, and failing, to pretend they are in master-slave relationships in the antebellum South. Act 2 shows us the same couples trying their best to salvage some meaning from their earlier performances. Harris makes quite clear that Téa and Patricia, while trying to obtain authentic responses from the couples are really only encouraging them to give the kind of performances they want. As we discover, Téa and Patricia themselves are performing the roles of therapist for the sake of a thesis. In Act 3 Harris shows us that even in as intimate a situation as sex, a couple is still performing roles.

The play asks, “If we are performing roles all the time, are we playing roles we choose or roles chosen by others?” Harris does give us much to talk about. Fortunately for us, if Slave Play is principally a play about life as performance, Canadian Stage well conveys that meaning through a production where the performances are of the very highest calibre.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Amy Rutherford as Alana, Sébastien Heins as Phillip, Kwaku Okyere as Gary, Justin Eddy as Dustin, Gord Rand as Jim and Sophia Walker as Kaneisha; Rebecca Applebaum as Patricia, Sophia Walker as Kaneisha, Gord Rand as Jim, Sébastien Heins as Phillip, Amy Rutherford as Alana, Justin Eddy as Dustin, Kwaku Okyere as Gary and Beck Lloyd as Téa; Gord Rand as Jim and Sophia Walker as Kaneisha; Amy Rutherford as Alana, Sébastien Heins as Phillip; Rebecca Applebaum as Patricia and Beck Lloyd as Téa. © 2025 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.canadianstage.com.