Gord Rand and Sophia Walker in Slave Play | Photo by Dahlia Katz
The sensationalistic rhetoric that has followed this play up from Broadway is good for publicity, of course, and it’s fun to anticipate being scandalized! Depending on your hang ups, this Canadian premiere of Slave Play, presented by Canadian Stage, might very well rattle the civilized furniture of your life; but playwright Jeremy O. Harris has more up his sleeve than tawdry shit disturbing. Oh, he’s very much attending to our sensitive and eager nether regions, for sure, though he really wants to play with the whole of us—body, mind and soul.
Even without knowing Slave Play’s deal, you’ll quickly realize that it’s up to something. Gillian Gallow’s set confronts us with a shiny black stage that seems intended for an elegant dance recital. Dark, glossy walls hint at the neoclassical architecture of a Southern plantation. An ornately framed fish-eye mirror pops decadently out to reflect the audience in miniature—we are very much a part of this.
When we first meet our characters in a series of Antebellum vignettes—slaves and masters—they seem deliberately out of place in their period attire on such a lustrous, bare stage. As tension mounts in a series of increasingly sexualized interactions, our hackles are raised for the violence and degradation history has conditioned us to expect from these scenarios.
Amped up Kaneisha (Sophia Walker) twerking for her overseer Jim (Gord Rand), horny Southern belle Alana (Amy Rutherford) and her attentive man-in-waiting Phillip (Sébastien Heins), off-white indentured servant Dustin (Justin Eddy) and his black manager Gary (Kwaku Okyere) are all being very frisky as they test the edges of their power dynamic. We quickly understand these three couples are haphazardly consensual partners here.
So, in the first of many subversions, we are confronted not with abject abuse, but deliriously awkward and hilarious seductions. O. Harris knows we’re a captive audience of perverts who have shown up to see attractive people do sexy things. And Slave Play doesn’t disappoint! The power tripping and racial fetishization is goofy and uncomfortable, but undeniably hot! Some stalling here, a little giggling there and a few expressions of frustration subtly nod towards the eventual reveal that this is all therapeutic role play.
Sophia Walker, Gord Rand, Rebecca Applebaum, Sébastien Heins and Amy Rutherford in Slave Play | Photo by Dahlia Katz
With the safe-word “Starbucks” having broken the spell, the moody and romantic atmosphere is completely abandoned for the second act, where our couples, now in contemporary clothing and naturalistic postures, sit under institutional fluorescents, primed for discussion. Once facilitators Teá (Beck Lloyd) and Patricia (Rebecca Applebaum) start talking, they nail that pretentious, indulgent language of Acknowledgement and Validation, and we recognize O. Harris’s satire as it ramps up. Even with the performative cringe of all this being “seen,” “unpacking” and “processing” involved in their gloriously unhinged “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy,” there is something raw and real underneath the absurd, pseudo-intellectual and kinky pageantry. The language is hokey, sure, but the dysfunction here bears witness to slavery’s pernicious legacy.
Both O.Harris’s clever writing and this cast’s layered performances negotiate a precarious duality here—that this is all sort of bullshit, but also rooted in very real trauma. This notion, that each of the black partners here have been unable to experience full sexual pleasure “because of racism” is both a joke and painfully accurate. As with all carefully crafted satire, we can’t easily dismiss anybody here, despite the humour.
We get vivid glimpses into each relationship and all are compelling. While everyone is given ample attention throughout the first two acts, Kaneisha and Jim close out the third act alone and, as they were the first role-play couple we see at the top, their strained intimacy bookends the story. The final scene between them once again subverts our expectations as it is a sore, discomfiting and poignant reflection of their introductory fetish scenario. With Rand’s full nudity and Walker’s guttural intensity, we feel invited into an acutely vulnerable space. In her guarded bearing, Walker conjures, quite vividly, the ancestors that inhabit her psyche.
Hein’s performance quite blindsided me. His baffled and affable dumb jock persona is endearing and charismatic, but when he finally realizes the significance of his Blackness and all but loses his shit, his hold over us, the weight of his revelation, is quite staggering. Shout-out to Okyere’s goosebump-inducing “No motherfucker I’m the prize!”and Rutherford’s hysterical “Am I even supposed to be talking?”—moments better experienced that described.
Director Jordan Laffrenier’s production has a restrained yet striking style that serves as a solid frame for the ensemble’s charged and authentic performances. The lengthy second act does loose some momentum in the middle. After we get a solid read on who everyone is and grasp their unique dynamics, the air gets stagnant for a spell. Though some dramatic inertia is lost, it’s still very real, reminding me of uncomfortable moments of disengagement or dissociation that occur from time to time.
Slave Play is not the theatrically de-stabilizing force hyperbolic pull-quotes tout it to be, but it does go some places—with intelligence, empathy and mischievous purpose. And if you’re offended by such experiential truths as a loving and sympathetic white partner to a black woman being recognized as a “demon” and a “virus,” maybe listen a little more carefully.
Slave Play
September 27 to October 26, 2025
Berkeley Street Theatre
(26 Berkeley Street)
2 hours, 15 minutes (with intermission)
Amy Rutherford and Sébastien Heins in Slave Play | Photo by Dahlia Katz