Though it’s mild, paradoxical and perhaps a bit prurient to say so, “Slave Play” is a happy surprise. It’s mild because Jeremy O. Harris’s play, which opened at the Golden Theater on Sunday, is one of the best and most provocative new works to show up on Broadway in years. It’s a paradox because what could be happy in a play about pain? A play so serious, so furious and so deeply engaged in the most intractable conflicts of American life that it became both a cause célèbre and a scandal before it opened? Those things are indeed a surprise, at least if you haven’t watched television this millennium.

Source: New York Times October 07, 2019 01:41 UTC