But he made a documentary about Slave Play anyway.
Jeremy O. Harris has spent a lot of time around cameras. Since writing Slave Play as a Yale School of Drama first-year student and bringing it Off Broadway after graduation, he signed a hefty deal with HBO, helped Janicza Bravo translate a 148-Tweet thread into a movie script (2021’s Zola), and appeared on Gossip Girl and Emily in Paris. Meanwhile, he has produced a handful of other stage projects and shepherded Slave Play through several new versions, including two Broadway runs, which earned him 12 Tony nominations, and a West End production that opens at the end of the month. Now, he’s giving Slave Play the Hollywood treatment — a sentence Harris would probably hate — in a new documentary directed by the playwright himself, Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play.
For all his proximity to film, you get the sense from the doc that Harris is sort of anti-movie. The title alone suggests he is, at the very least, leery of film as an art form — just look at how much punctuation he needed to make sure we understand how to classify this project. “It’s not that film is less than or more than theater,” Harris clarifies when I ask what his stance is. “I want theater brought back up to the space in culture where it was for many years, and where I think it should be, because they serve different functions.”
The function of Slave Play — the documentary, that is, which premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival and is available on HBO — is something Harris half-jokingly refers to as “theater propaganda.” In the first half, which was filmed in 2022, he workshops the script with a group of new actors, aiming to re-create the sense of play and experimentation he felt when he first brought the script to life in drama school. The second half cuts those actors’ monologues with self-reflective bits about the documentary itself, showing Harris’s play footage for the original Yale class and film of himself editing the footage he has so far (and then of filming himself editing that footage, ad infinitum). It feels a little like a cinematic scrapbook of Slave Play’s existence from inception to the present day; sprinkled throughout are snippets from Mandingo and Black Snake, piles of web pages Harris had open on his computer when he came up with the premise, and clips of him doing interviews once the play became the inflammatory cultural touchstone it is today. The film is anything but linear, more of an art-house project than the kind of fact-finding mission that mainstream documentary-making typically involves.
“A lot of modern docs are more journalistic in their approach to storytelling,” says Harris, who was inspired by experimental ’70s auteurs like William Greaves and D.A. Pennebaker. “What if you made something that felt more individualized and unique?”
Since Slave Play went to Broadway, you’ve been screenwriting, acting, and producing for television while developing more theater projects. What would you say unifies all your work?
Me. The thing I love about experimentation is you’re seeing someone who’s not afraid of playing or being silly or having fun with the form. I’m not taking myself or the forms I’m in that seriously, and that has elicited an exciting form of dramaturgy for audiences. I think that’s a unifying factor. Wait till you hear my album, it’s very fun.
Slave Play debuted in 2017 and has been through many iterations. Did coming back to it through this documentary make you see it differently?
The architecture of the play shifts depending on the bodies that are a part of it, so it evolves every time I meet a new audience or cast. The bodies that have been a part of it in this iteration taught me how truly malleable the play is. I’d had such a heavy hand in every version of it before, and it was easy to imagine that the play might not function if I weren’t there. To be in a rehearsal room with kids doing scene study and feel the play could stand on its own next to a lot of the other amazing plays people do scene study with? I was, like, This is cool.
For the documentary itself, what guided your approach?
I wanted to see a documentary that looked like the ones I love from the ’70s and less like the ones I was seeing on Netflix, Max, and Hulu recently. Maybe because there’s no murder in mine. There’s a documentary by William Greaves called Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. I love William Friedkin so much. Frederick Wiseman’s documentary High School is one of my favorites. I love Shirley Clarke, and her Portrait of Jason, which I mention in the film, is a big reference for me. I also really love D.A. Pennebaker and his Company doc, which is phenomenal. And Camille Billops.
Billops and Greaves and Clarke and Pennebaker had a patience with their camera and a fearlessness about using every tool at their disposal to tell the story — and not just the easiest ones. There are a lot of unexpected techniques sprinkled throughout the documentaries of these auteurs.
I also love all those weird videos of Uta Hagen working with actors or even Inside the Actors Studio — theatrical ephemera that’s fallen by the wayside. I wish there were more documentation of someone like Annie Baker so I could know her process. I wish someone had a really good documentary made of Caryl Churchill so I could learn her more. Adrienne Kennedy is, like, my favorite human being in the world, and her grandson Canaan is an amazing documentarian who made all these YouTube videos about her that are really cool. But I want more.
In the second part of the movie, you talk about the limitations of film as opposed to theater.
I’m a theater supremacist.
Exactly. How did you navigate those feelings while making a movie?
I say I’m a theater supremacist, but all of my plays have a basis in some filmic reference. The function of theater is about engaging our imagination. The function of film is about informing it. When I tell you in a play that I’m holding an apple, I don’t have to be holding an apple, but movies require visual effects to make sense of whether the apple is there or not. You can have a more passive relationship to your imagination while witnessing a film. I got to use this film to inform everyone’s imagination about what theater is. In many ways, I’m hoping people’s passive imaginations allow this film to work, and for the theater propaganda I am putting inside everyone’s brains to stick.
The theater supremacy.
Yes! I want you to walk away and be like, Wow, I really wanna see a play now.
During the editing process, which you filmed and put in the documentary, you’re wearing a shirt with Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona on it. Is that supposed to have a bigger significance? You also talk a little about Shakespeare in that scene.
It’s just a very, very good vintage shirt that matched the Versace suit I was wearing really well. It’s from The Two Gentlemen of Verona musical that premiered at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park in 1971, and I found it at a store right next to the Public Theater. It’s these two very well endowed, naked women on the cover of this musical, which is so ’71. No one would make a poster this psychedelic and cool and sexy now.
We also get to see a smattering of browser tabs that inspired the conception of Slave Play. What tabs do you have open right now?
There’s this game I downloaded called The Roottrees Are Dead. It’s a family-tree puzzle game where you’re solving a mystery. I have a tab open to a Wikipedia page about body dysmorphic disorder … I have a New York Times article about Poland’s art world and how it sits as a potential casualty of the far-right movement there … I have Two Faces … Behind the Scenes, which is a behind-the-scenes documentary of The Two Faces of January. Boots Riley tweeted that if you want to know how to make a film, you need to watch that doc. And then I have my Google calendar.
As someone who gets a lot of their ideas from internet rabbit holes into their work, do you ever have trouble delineating what is procrastination and what is work?
In the play I’m producing right now, Invasive Species, there’s a great line: “Anything can be homework when you’re an actor.” I think that’s true of playwrights as well.
Do you have any prewriting rituals?
I try to turn off my phone and put my computer on airplane mode. I’ve started doing this thing where I jump on TikTok Live and let kids watch me write because it forces me to keep going. I love reading before I write, so I give myself 45 minutes to an hour to read and then jump into writing. I love to read a play by someone I really respect but who writes totally differently from me so I can get a little jealous. Like, Why can’t I do that! It forces me to write really well in what I am good at doing. Either inspiration or envy takes over and pushes me to get something done.
You’re throwing a dinner party for five celebrities, dead or alive. Who are you inviting?
Adrienne Kennedy. Paul Thomas Anderson ’cause he sent me an e-mail and then didn’t respond to my response, which was weird, so I wanna confront him. Paul, what? Pedro Almodóvar would be a really good time. He’d be able to get stuff out of Adrienne, and Adrienne would be really interested in him and his work. And then I’d bring someone young and fun: Jennifer Lawrence. Hanni from New Jeans because I really want to meet her and I think she’s really fab. You always need one really young person at a dinner party. I used to be that person; now I’m getting older, so I’m trying to keep the tradition alive.
What’s the last meal you cooked for dinner?
Cooked? That’s the answer. Cooked, question mark.
What’s your comfort rewatch?
Right now it’s Sex and the City. I also get a lot of comfort rewatching My Hero Academia and Attack on Titan because I just love to see great storytelling. I also love a good Interview With a Vampire rewatch. First season of that? Best writing in the world.
What’s the best piece of gossip you’ve ever heard?
Cecil Taylor told me Miles Davis was a real creep with boys. He was like, “Everyone said I was the gay jazz player and that’s ’cause I was! But no one talks about what Miles was doing with those boys in the showers.” I was like, “What?” It came out in that way that only old people can give you good gossip, where they just say it so casually and you’re, like, WHAT??
What’s your favorite game to play?
Right now, my partner and I play Monopoly Deal intensely and erotically. I love a little Kingdom Hearts. I’m a big Metal Gear fan. Final Fantasy also. I love those kinds of games. The Sims is the classic game I wish I could play again.
What music do you listen to when you’re alone?
Right now, the only music I’m listening to is Brat on repeat. Loud. It’s Brat season; I’m a one-man streaming farm. “Sympathy Is a Knife” is by far the height of amazing songwriting and quiet shade. We all know who she’s talking about. And she was very careful to talk about her in such a way that none of her psycho fans would attack her. But if you know, you know. And shots were fired. She wrote a song in her style better than her. And it’s this amazing, musically complex, rich, elevated thing that recognizes her age and her growth as a musician — something that other artist can’t say is true on a sonic level.
But then “Everything Is Romantic” really fucked me up the other day, and “Club Classics” I think is one of the best elegies ever. It’s a really great mirror to “So I.” I used to be a critic, and the one thing I wish I could write about right now is Brat.
Name a book you couldn’t put down.
Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women. That was the last book I read that made me feel like I was reading Harry Potter again. You know that feeling when you’re little and you have to keep reading? That book was amazing. And then also Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Don’t let anyone tamper your light. Janicza Bravo told me that.
How about the worst?
Someone at Yale told me that they really loved the musical Hamilton and that I should take the advice that Aaron Burr gives in the show, which is “Talk less, smile more.” They were like, “People don’t love your energy, and I think that’s the best advice ever.” I was like, “He’s the villain in that musical. What are you talking about? He’s the bad guy.”
What’s the worst thing someone can do at a dinner party?
I know so many bad-energy bitches out here, and they should just stay home. Some people have rotted energy that’s fun, like Real Housewives rotted. They’re so rotted that they’ll share that rot to the middle of the table. We can all work with that. We can move in and around the rot. But then there’s vacuum rot, and it makes everyone notice how rotted they are by not speaking, so it’s a really loud, discomforting vacuum. I really hate those people. If you’re one of those people, stay home.
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