“Love, Actually?” is Not
In Fact an actual “Slave Play”
By TONY VELLELA
Ever since it opened at Broadway’s Golden Theatre, moving uptown from a highly acclaimed off-Broadway run at downtown’s New York Theatre Workshop, “Slave Play,” by Jeremy O. Harris has been considered a front-runner for a Best Play Tony Award. Take notice at how the playwright named his new, controversial work. Is it a play? Is it about the act of playing? Neither? Both?
When two colleagues at a university join forces to create a new method of exploring sexual misfunction within mixed-race couples, the result is a week-long exercise located in a former plantation in rural Virginia. One of the real flaws in what has become a true exploration of how the couples relate within their partnerships is our lack of awareness of the regular activities these six people – two straight couples and one male gay couple – that is it that permits them to take a week off from whatever it is that routinely occupies their time. They are all professionals – some teach, some write, etc., but the specifics are left vague, except that they are not blue-collar types. They can afford in every sense of that word to take the time to be away for many days. While this may seem like a trivial point, it would go a long way in helping us understand who these people are, and what brought them to this project. We don’t know if they were chosen from a group of volunteers, or whether they have previously undertaken any type of sexual therapy sessions.
The core question is what is wrong within their relationships and whether or how it can be remedied. The study is designed to take a week, and we join them during and after day number four. They have been paired up as ‘slave’ and ‘master,’ to identify the basic identities that the therapists believe need to be delved into. On Day Four, we first meet Kaneisha as she is discovered scrubbing the floor, for her ‘master,’ Phillip. She insists on being called a negress, to give her the feeling of being dirty. Their physical activity makes it clear that the object of this particular exercise is to explore dominance and submission. They are what has commonly come to be termed a BDSM couple – for Bondage, Dominance, Sado-Masochism pairing, by choice, it would seem. But it is the underlying broken nature of their sexual attraction that is of interest to the therapists, who are testing out their ideas on how couples like this – one a dominant partner and the other the submissive one – that form the platform for their study, which has not been published or sanctioned yet by the profession. The therapists seek acknowledgement that they are breaking new ground in their study.
The subjects are also not students, but functioning in-the-world adults. We aren’t told how it is that they don’t seem to be being compensated for their participation, nor are we to know whether they are paying to be studied. Their private lives do not define their careers or workplace behaviors. What the therapists are eager to focus on is the role that race plays in how they relate to each other as sexual partners. While dominance and submissiveness are at the core of the premise, it is the underlying racism that is the focus. Are they now, or have they been willing to challenge this point of difference? Do they bring it into their foreplay, their activity, their post-encounter talk?
What we do see is how their interplay plays out, in fairly graphic sequences that depict how they ‘do it.’ While nothing here is shocking per se, audiences are not used to seeing the degree of explicit activity we are privy to. It is revelatory how much we learn from the non-verbal segments, about who takes the lead, who does the talking, etc. While the relationships are pretty universal and timeless, playwright has even managed to insert the phrase du jour ‘down a rabbit hole’ into the conversations to prove how current it all is.
“Slave Play” is more about how the word ‘play’ is utilized here. While it certainly defines what form of cultural activity we are witnessing, it is more about what we are seeing, which is the activity of sexuality, being played out. This is usually ‘none of our business,’ but we are to assume that the selection process that created this particular grouping took into account the initial attraction that made them couples in the first place. How did they choose each other?
What is surely tantalizing about the premise that the play seems to promise is answers to the core differences, the play does a masterful job of revealing all the possible reasons for the key questions, while at the same time not putting itself forward as having all the answers. Yes, this is a play about sexual malfunctioning, but add in race as aa key factor, and you have an even more provocative premise – does the role of race come to be seen as the major component in this pairing-up process? Do they address it, or even acknowledge it? Do the discoveries mirror those commonly thought to exist in American society as a whole, or are they anomalies?
Slave Play
Our visit to Day Four includes the full treatment of looking at how they relate to each other were they living in pre-Civil War America , complete with appropriate costuming and language. We are grateful for director Robert O’Hara’s deft manipulation of three couples keeping things fluid, and are especially thankful for the back wall mirror in the set design by Clint Ramos that lets us see ourselves as we really are, voyeurs in this process of trying to do more than play at being a slave – we are seeing ourselves as either the dominant one or the submissive one, or neither or both. Harris is not playing around with these crucial, serious pieces of our identities.
What is not at all serious is the riotous musical “Love, Actually?,” which takes on the 2003 British film of the same title, set in London at Christmas time, which seeks to drive home the point that everyone in Britain is incapable of not falling in love with whomever is handy, from the charmer, a young British prime minister, to the extras on a movie set. The producers label this concoction a parody [the usher hands you a Parodybill instead of a Playbill as you are seated in the cozy Jerry Orbach off-Broadway venue named Theatre Center, which also houses the record-breaking mystery play “Perfect Crime” and has also given “The Fantasticks” a home. This time, it’s a flat-out rom-com [romantic comedy for those who never settle in for a few laughs with a television-style romantic comedy] that gets skewered, in what is actually a combination parody [an imitation of the original] and a satire [an attempt at making fun, often with a dose of making the host work look foolish or silly]. And this stage interpretation of the film “Love, Actually” actually skillfully manages to combine both forms, with an emphasis on parody. There’s not a mean bone in its multi-character body.
And the key to its success as solid entertainment lies in that ‘multi,’ where all the actors in the film turn up in this comedy, and where the characters are all re-named as the actors who brought them to life in the perennially popular picture. Hugh Grant depicts the prime minister, called ‘Hugh,’ who is irresistibly attractive to all people of the opposite sex, and are Liam Neeson and Emma Thompson really getting it on, and what about that wacky French dame who pops up from time to time?
Here’s the very good news for anyone shopping for a good time: you don’t need to have seen the film in order to enjoy the stage comedy. If you were able to suspend disbelief when you were coaxed into seeing “Mamma Mia,” you will feel right at home here. And believe it or not, one of the secrets to juggling all these folks as distinct from each other as you can lies with the true genius work created by the show’s wig designer Dustin Cross, who must have had a remarkable budget to work with in giving each new visitor to the set of this comedy a distinct enough identity carry you along so that the Emma Thompson character is never confused with Joni Mitchell.
One of the critical decisions that “Love, Actually?” creators Bob and Tobly McGrath [book & lyrics] and Basil Winterbottom [music & orchestrations] made from the get-go was to house this frenetically-paced little gem during the shooting of the film, so we see extras double as non-speaking characters, giving us the perspective that we, as audience members steeped in the land of movie-making, can bring to the proceedings. We get it when camera work needs to be adjusted. We understand it when the lead role gets all that attention. Most of all, we feel like we are part of the story-telling, letting us ‘in’ on all the humor, without the need to have seen the original. As an audience member, I had never seen the film, and was perfectly oriented to the goings-on from scene to scene. The seamless continuity owes much to the quick timing presented by director Tim Drucker.
The writing so boldly, baldly up front about who is under the spotlight from moment to moment that there is no need to bring along a score card. Everyone is a target, whether they are characters in the movie plot or actors big and not-so-big who agreed to star in this parody. Someone once said that satire is what closes on Saturday night. Here, what we have is a parody, and given the film’s iconic status among film-goers of all ages, is not likely to vanish by the end of the week.
AfterPlay
La Mama brings to New York “Winter Songs on Mars,” on December 21. This theater event is a celebration, a ritual of the Carpathian Mountains, with performances by Yara Arts Group in collaboration with Nova Opera, an avant-garde music theater troupe from Kyiv, which is much in the news these days . . . on December 4, the limited three-week performance schedule of “A City of Refuge,” written and directed by Evan Cuyler-Louison begins for the Primitive Grace Theatre Ensemble’s schedule of performances. The work traces experiences around the Washington Heights riots, featuring Dominican-born actor Wilton Guzman in the cast . . . Jersey City proclaims itself America’s most diverse city in America, and to highlight that claim, Shakespeare @ will launch its second site-specific production of “Romeo & Juliet” in locations familiar to residents of the city, and new to first-time audiences for this theatre group that specializes in featuring diverse, sprawling casts in often difficult-to-stage presentations. This venture premieres in April; for more information, visit shakespeare-at.org . . . the South Street Seaport Museum plays host to “The Very Hungry Caterpillar Show Experience from now through December 29, with a schedule that features Friday and Saturday performances three times a day and details are available at www.seaportmuseum.org/hungrycaterpillar. The show includes an interactive puppet show and a variety of activities. The show is based on author/illustrator Eric Carle’s book that has sold more than 43 million copies worldwide to eager readers around the world . . . another production that presents marionettes is “A Christmas Carol,” by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre from December 19 to January 5. If you attend dressed this Dickens classic, gets you a $2 discount on your ticket. Ticket info is available at www.theaterforthenewcity.net.
On Book
“Love, Actually?” stirs the imagination as to the place of solid, well-written humor in today’s world, and no one exemplifies that objective, despite his work premiering more than half a century ago, than James Thurber. For a great laugh-out-loud good read, pick up the playscript for “A Thurber Carnival,” and learn more about this American humorist genius in “My Life and Hard times” [Harper & Brothers] . . . during this endless-seeming holiday season, the iconic picture “It’s a Wonderful Life,” from director Frank Capra, and to discover the wide range of pictures that he created, and still survive generations of viewing, pick up his autobiography “The Name Above the Title,” from the Macmillan Company, as well as Harrison Kinney’s very comprehensive “James Thurber – His Life and Times,” from Henry Holt and Company.
TONY VELLELA wrote and produced the theatre-themed PBS series “Character Studies.” His play “Admissions won the Best Play Award at the New York International Fringe Festival, received three productions in New York, and is published by Playscripts. His has written reviews and feature stories about the entertainment world in The Christian Science Monitor, Rolling Stone, Parade, Dramatics, Reader’s Digest and dozens of other publications. His play “Maisie and Grover Go to the Theatre” is published by ArtAge. He has taught theatre classes at the 92nd St. Y, Columbia University’s Teachers College, at HB Studio and other institutions nationally, as well as in private coaching sessions. His “Test of Time” won the Best Documentary CableAce Award for Lifetime Television.
CARMEL CAR & LIMOUSINE SERVICE, in business since 1978, has been selected as the official transportation company for Intermission Talk. Its wide variety of services, including special theatre package, and reservations, are available at carmellimo.com, the Carmel App or at 212 – 666 – 6666.