Jeremy O. Harris’ film about his Broadway play “Slave Play” begins with a young Black woman in an NYU sweatshirt looking straight up at the ceiling and screaming with great violence. It’s alarming, it’s disorienting, but it turns out to preview what’s absolutely the best part of “Slave Play. Not A Movie. A Play,” a freewheeling, fascinating, self-indulgent, often exasperating mess of a film that could well become a must-see for theater lovers. It is scheduled to start streaming on Max June 20 .after its run at the Tribeca Festival.
Some 75 minutes into the film, the screaming moment reappears, and we realize we’re watching an acting student named LaTanya Grant performing the final scene of “Slave Play,” in response to a stage direction from the play that is projected onto the screen: “The actress playing Kaneisha does whatever she feels is right…”
The most involving parts of “Slave Play. Not A Movie. A Play” are verbatim from the play, taking up almost half the 79-minute running time.
The rest of “Slave Play. Not A Movie. A Play” is uneven, and uncertain. “What do you think this documentary is about,” Harris asks somebody at one point. “I don’t think you know Jeremy,” comes the reply, which would be funnier if that was the only such exchange in the film.
There are straightforward documentary conventions, such as excerpts from TV segments and interviews with Harris, conversations that explain his approach to his work and the reason for it (“I want to invite us to imagine all the ways that slavery still lives with us”), very brief insertions of old film footage, from “Mandingo” and “Gone with the Wind,” There is an extended scene of an outraged white woman who’s just seen the play, shouting from the audience at Harris on stage, apparently at a talk-back, that she’s sick of being accused of racism: “I’ve heard my whole that I’m the fucking problem and there’s no solution.”
But there is also a conscious (self-conscious) effort at being experimental, meta-theatrical. Harris looks at scenes from the film on an editing machine with the film editor, and talks extensively about the difference between theater and film, and how much he likes theater. At the very end, a woman compliments him, and he tells her that he’s not going to put that in the documentary: If he puts someone saying “Jeremy is a genius” in the documentary, “I look crazy.” (“Crazy” is not the word I’d use.)
Much of this feels besides the point when acting students from William Esper Studio perform selected scenes from Act I, filmed in dramatic close-up. They are compelling, mostly reading from the published script, and occasionally interrupted by Harris, serving as their director. He offers advice about their performances, and in the process gives insights about what he wrote.
It’s not clear to me how people will react to the film who haven’t seen or read “Slave Play,” because I saw the play, twice, first Off-Broadway and then on Broadway. I know that the movie basically omits half the plot. The first act is set on the MacGregor Plantation in Virginia during slavery times, where we witness three alternating, over-the-top encounters between three interracial couples. To call these interactions transgressive feels like a comical understatement. At one point, one of the actresses, Pip Grenda, is told to lean into the aggressive sexuality, to be more forceful in pronouncing a racist epithet. She admits she’s uncomfortable with it. “We’re giving you permission to do this.” Another student calls the play “porn.” Another says: “I liked it when I read it, and hated it when I saw it.”
One is tempted to give Harris credit for including negative comments in his film, except that it’s hard to avoid the impression that he gets off on the outrage that his writing provokes.
What the film doesn’t explicitly reveal is that in Act II the characters turn out to be modern-day interracial couples role-playing as part of what their therapists describe as “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy, a radical therapy designed to help black partners re-engage intimately with white partners from whom they no longer receive sexual pleasure.” All that is omitted from the film, but it’s hinted at in things Harris says to the acting students about their motivation.
Does he assume that anybody who will see this movie has seen or read the play already, or is he just being sloppy, or is he deliberately withholding? I had a less ambivalent reaction when the film boasts that “Slave Play” was nominated for twelve Tony Awards, which was at the time the greatest number of nominations for a non-musical play in history (surpassed this year by “Stereophonic.”) But I don’t remember any mention in the film that the play wound up winning none of them.
Slave Play. Not A Movie. A Play.
“The Mayfly,” we’re told at the outset, is “inspired by a true event,” even though the main character is an insect who only lives about twenty-four hours – which is considerably longer than this charming animated movie musical by Betty Buckley, which is only about seven minutes long, one of seven animated shorts in “a program curated by Whoopi G.”
Megalyn Mayfly emerges from the pastel-hued lake at Central Park with such an all-consuming passion for music that she listens to Miss Judy Blue Eyes outside her Upper West Side apartment, and later hitches a ride on the jacket of her bike-riding piano accompanist into the Café Carlyle, where she dances gaily with gossamer wings to Miss Judy’s music, soaring to the top of the mural, and resting at last in bliss upon Miss Judy’s white hair.
