Jeremy O. Harris’s 2018 Slave Play has taken a life of its own since it was released. as the pandemic and racial reckoning has grown controversy around its contents.Dahlia Katz/Canadian Stage
- Title: Slave Play
- Written by: Jeremy O. Harris
- Performed by: Rebecca Applebaum, Sébastien Heins, Kwaku Okyere, Amy Rutherford, Justin Eddy, Beck Lloyd, Gord Rand, Sophia Walker
- Directed by: Jordan Laffrenier
- Company: Canadian Stage
- Venue: Berkeley Street Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: Runs until Oct. 26
Critic’s Pick
Sometimes the most controversial thing a play can be is, well, pretty good.
To be fair, the north-of-the-border premiere of Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play – now playing in a slick, sexy production at Canadian Stage – is often better than that, and in a few key moments, it is excellent.
But since Slave Play’s off-Broadway premiere in 2018 – a lifetime, or at least a global pandemic and racial reckoning, ago – the work has grown a thick layer of controversy around it, a sticky film of hashtags and boycotts that in 2025 feels almost passé.
“Really?” you might find yourself asking as Slave Play unspools, dildos and bullwhips flying through the air. “This was what all the fuss was about?”
A few particularly shocking moments aside – a devastating scene featuring full-frontal nudity, and a guttural scream from actor Sophia Walker that shakes the very foundation of the Berkeley Street Theatre – Slave Play is just that, a play. Harris borrows from playwrights Anton Chekhov, August Wilson, William Shakespeare and Lorraine Hansberry in his exploration of race, psychology and sex. The writing is clever, punchy and taut, and director Jordan Laffrenier smartly gets out of Harris’s way as the work barrels toward its cataclysmic conclusion.
Sophia Walker and Gord Rand play Kaneisha and Jim in Slave Play. Walker's layered performance ought to be remembered come next year’s Dora Awards.Dahlia Katz/Canadian Stage
But in the years since Harris burst onto the American theatre scene, something has happened to Slave Play – a mythology has taken shape that suggests the play is somehow more than what it is. Some have framed Slave Play as a gathering place for dialogue surrounding interracial relationships; others have suggested it’s a blueprint for how theatres in the U.S. ought to engage with race.
But Slave Play, written from Harris’s specific point of view as a piece of fiction, is neither of those things. Some audiences will agree with the conclusions Harris’s characters come to about how Black women so often bear the brunt of white fragility; others won’t. Like any well-written play, Slave Play will be divisive as a piece of drama. But that’s all it is: a piece of drama.
When we meet Kaneisha (Walker) and Jim (Gord Rand), it’s clear something’s not right from the start: Kaneisha, dressed in a floor-length skirt and old-timey tunic, is twerking.
The couple speaks in syrupy Southern drawls, and Kaneisha begs to call her husband “Massa Jim” – he demurs, asking instead to be addressed as “Mista Jim” as they begin to make love. Their dynamic is pinched, a little plasticky – what sort of plantation is this?
Sophia Walker as Kaneisha. Slave Play’s first act is an explosion of fantasy and discomfort that has enough substance to be its own one-act play.Dahlia Katz/Canadian Stage
Soon enough, they disappear into the side of the stage. Now it’s Alana (Amy Rutherford) and Phillip’s (Sébastien Heins) turn – Alana, dressed to the gills in Antebellum frills, barks orders at Phillip, long vowels oozing from her lips as Phillip awkwardly plays the violin. She yanks at her gown to reveal a decidedly modern bustier and panty set, and suggests, still in that hokey accent, that she and her partner enter the world of pegging. Cue blackout.
Finally, we meet Gary (Kwaku Okyere) and Dustin (Justin Eddy) as they circle around piles of cotton, daring one another not to laugh. Their bond feels less forced, less blindly committed to the constraints of… wherever they are. When they eventually have sex, the ecstasy is palpable – until Gary begins to weep.
Slave Play’s first act is an explosion of fantasy and discomfort that could be a complete one-act play on its own. But what follows is more didactic, a tornado of therapyspeak and broken promises that provides context for those wild opening scenes.
These couples, we learn, exist in a time that approximates the late 2010s. Until now, their relationships were plagued by silence – race was an unspoken part of their stories. (A convenience for the white and white-passing partners; a cutting edge for the Black lovers forced daily to contend with the history of colonization in their bodies and beds.)
Laffrenier’s cast is superb: While Walker’s wounded, layered Kaneisha ought to be remembered come next year’s Dora Awards, Rand also makes the most of a profoundly difficult role that asks him to bare his soul (and genitalia) in front of a live audience night after night. Heins and Rutherford play beautifully together, as well, as do Okyere and Eddy.
Beck Lloyd and Rebecca Applebaum, as group facilitators Teá and Patricia, inject a welcome dose of humour into Harris’s disturbing second act. Their dynamic as partners – in business and in life – is as cracked as those which they’re ostensibly there to help heal. Both Lloyd and Applebaum mine their characters for depth and irony, and emerge from Slave Play with heavy handfuls of both.
Canadian Stage's production of Slave Play runs until Oct. 26, 2025, at Toronto's Berkeley Street Theatre.Dahlia Katz/Canadian Stage
Gillian Gallow’s obsidian set offers a reflective background (à la A Chorus Line) that reflects the audience as well as the backs of the actors onstage – the props they’re hiding, and the sea of faces staring at them as they simulate sex. It’s a compelling design that complicates the events of Harris’s story, further enhanced by Daniel Bennett’s moody, understated lighting.
But where Slave Play trips, if at all, is on its own metanarrative – on the seven years that have passed since Harris first became the target of anti-Black culture wars and frothy think-pieces. Since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the way we talk about race in North America has changed. (Sexual taboo, too, has become less so – it’s tough to say if The Globe and Mail might have approved of the word “dildo” in a theatre review in an era before influencers en masse became comfortable with marketing sex toys on social media.)
In post-2020 Canada, the themes of Slave Play feel doubly removed – once by time, and again by border. (There are a great many Americanisms in Harris’s script that have not been tweaked in the play’s journey north.) Much of what made Slave Play edgy in 2018 feels more quotidian now, the thorny talks on whiteness and its capacity to infect society, and the pointed critiques of the language we use to describe folks of mixed race.
Where does that leave Canadian Stage’s Slave Play? That’ll depend on the audiences who see it – the theatre patrons who I hope engage with the work as a robust dramedy rather than a provocation to wield the word “woke” as an insult. Harris’s play is served well in Laffrenier’s production, and all things considered, it’s a juicy, tender piece of theatre. Controversial? Perhaps. But look a little deeper: It’s much more than that.