production stars Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, Jonathan Higginbotham, Devin Kawaoka, Chalia La Tour, Irene Sofia Lucio, Paul Alexander Nolan, Jakeem Dante Powell and Elizabeth Stahlmann. Slave Play follows three interracial couples through something called “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy,” a program they signed up for because the black partners no longer feel sexual attraction to their white partners. “ Slave Play is a radical study in American memory: the psychologies of the prized and of the oppressed the grateful and the entitled who’s top, who’s bottom who speaks, who can’t,a nd who betta listen.” This could prod open regrets and secrts and what you find could be shock,” she read. After brief remarks from the pair and Harris’s introduction, he passed the microphone to his friend, Morgan Parker, for a reading of “A Note on Your Discomfort.” To celebrate the reopening, CTG associate artistic directors Tyrone Davis and Lindsay Allbaugh kicked off the show by welcoming the audience, which included notable names Ashley Park, Sofia Boutella, Samira Wiley, Patrick Fabian and Rashaad Hall. “I wanted to write plays.” Harris extended his gratitude to Center Theatre Group for mounting the production inside its venue, Mark Taper Forum, which, prior to Slave Play, had been dark for 24 months. “I had big dreams of becoming a marquee name as a film and television actor, and then woke up one day and realized, that’s not what I wanted to do,” he explains. After the smashing success (and divisive responses) to Slave Play, Harris has become an in-demand Hollywood screenwriter with credits on Zola, Euphoria and Gossip Girl with his own shows on the horizon.Įvents of the Week: 'The Adam Project,' 'Lucy and Desi' and Moreīut tonight is about debuting the piece that made him a star in a place he hoped to become one. “Like, ‘Hey, guys, I know I slept on your couch probably but now I have a play at Mark Taper Forum.'” Those couch surfing days are not that far in the rearview - roughly five years - though much has happened since.
“This is now my chance to come out to a lot of the community that I grew up with here,” the 32-year-old tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Though the crew seems to be under his employ, Harris won’t say what or whom the filming is for, and with showtime in 10 minutes, he is not only unbothered, he’s beaming. There’s a camera pointed at him and a boom mic overhead as the Slave Play sensation does a quick set of junket-style interviews before doors close to Mark Taper Forum for a special opening night presentation on Wednesday. Harris is dressed in head-to-toe Gucci and surrounded by a production crew on the tented patio of Abernethy’s in Downtown Los Angeles.