Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay, y'all. We just waited through a whole lot of heavy in our extended conversation on misinformation, so now let's get offline. How about a little trip to the theater? Thanks for the program. Excuse me. Thanks. Okay, you found your seat? Got your mask secured? Phone silenced. Now [shushing]. Lights rolling down, curtains coming up. Are you comfortable?

Well, then I sure hope you bought a ticket for Wicked, or The Lion King, or even To Kill a Mockingbird, because If your stub says Slave Play, there's really no point in settling in because in a few moments, you are not going to be feeling so comfortable at all. The edgy seat-squirming mild distress, about to overtake you, is exactly what playwright Jeremy O Harris wants.

Jeremy O Harris: When I start talking about these things, it's going to create a ruckus, and that's just because that's my nature. I've always been that-- I'm a Gemini, I'm a double Gemini, forest moon. That means I'm also stubborn. I'll say chaotic things and then cause a fire, and then stubbornly stand by the physicians I've given to everyone around me. I think that part of the fraught nature, the racial tensions that arise from the play, or the emotional tensions that arise from what it means to have these conversations in the open, I was used to.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, Harris is best known as the writer behind the Tony-nominated Slave Play. It's a comedy that follows three interracial couples attempting to work through relationship issues by doing Antebellum South sexual role play. It's a show that asks very messy questions around race and sexuality. Slave Play ended its initial run on Broadway several months before the pandemic shut the entire theater world down. This month, it's back on Broadway, and guaranteed to upend expectations for a whole new audience.

Jeremy O Harris: I have so many conflicted feelings about bringing anything back for a group of people to sit in one room together and witness. That sense of sitting in the community with other people is so fraught right now, and it's something I think we're all getting our sea legs about. I feel so much exhilaration when I start thinking about what it does mean that I can see this play once again. A play I thought, A, would never go to Broadway in the first place, but now it's going back for the second time. This time with an audience seeing it with new eyes. There's a real exhilaration about that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I spoke with Jeremy O Harris about Slave Play's return to Broadway, and why audience discomfort is so important for his work.

Jeremy O Harris: I wanted to situate an audience, a brown audience, a Black audience, a white audience, a queer audience, inside of my psyche. I don't see the work of being a playwright, my own work of being playwright, as a work of anything other than inviting people who are not me to see the world through my eyes, to see my nightmare, see my dreams.

I wanted the world that came to this play, the people that came to this play, to live with the discomfort I've lived with as someone who's had a litany of mental illnesses that were undiagnosed for most of my childhood, and have had to grow up as a six foot five, Black gay man for most of my life, making people uncomfortable and feeling uncomfortable in the presences of all of the institutions I was a part of.

So much of the the work of the play is me creating images that I'm very comfortable with, because I've lived with these images in a litany of ways for many years, and presenting to people, and not letting them off the hook, because I want them to walk through Slave Play the way I feel I walk through the world, which is constantly having to reevaluate my position within it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Everybody's uncomfortable, but I wonder if bi-racial folks are particularly distraught by this play.

Jeremy O Harris: You know what's so funny? Is that I think it depends. Again, I think it truly depends. One of my friends, who's an actress in bi-racial, I think she felt fine with me telling this one. She saw the play, and it energized her in this really huge way. With her boyfriend that night, and she's like, "I don't think I want to date a white person right now. I just don't think I do."

Melissa Harris-Perry: Oh, man. Your art is breaking up relationships, man.

Jeremy O Harris: The amount of people who've broken up with their partners because of Slave Play is insane. It's actually crazy. I think that more so than anything, I think it woke her up to an idea of self-actualization around questions she hadn't asked herself, around what she was worth inside of a relationship, inside of a country or a world that doesn't see very many places for her. I think she felt some self-actualization happened after she witnessed the play that allowed her to say, "I actually think this is where I want to stop with you, with this journey." Being with a white man from a family of very conservative Canadians.

I think the people who generally have the most problems with it, I've seen or I've witnessed, are often just people who are prone to be in interracial relationships for most of their life. Those are the people who seem to have the bigger complexities with it. Whereas the children of those people, I think, see a lot of things reflected in the play that they hadn't put language to from their childhoods.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I was going to say you've organized a few Blackout performances. What is the Blackout? Why was it important to you to do this?

Jeremy O Harris: A Blackout is a night at the theater that is for only Black-identifying audiences. I say that knowing that that's really impossible. The last two Blackouts, there were white people who bought tickets for the play, and we weren't like, "Get out. Didn't you see it's a Blacks only?" We were just like, "Hey. What's up, dude?"

Melissa Harris-Perry: I think that's against the law if you had thrown them out. We have rules about that.

Jeremy O Harris: It's deeply against the law. It was quite funny because I think they're online. There's this idea that because I just said I wanted to create a safe space, an affinity space for Black people to see my play, there are white people online who are like, "See, now if a white theater did this, you would be up in arms." I'm like, "Well, white theaters do it every time I go see any play." You go see The Lehman Trilogy and it's a whiteout. It's truly a whiteout in that audience. I've always been the only Black person in the theater when I see plays. I think that people forget that it was very recently that Jim Crow laws were literally lifted from our theaters around the country.

My grandmother grew up at a time when she was my age where she couldn't just go see any place she wanted, because there's some theaters that wouldn't let her in. I think that if we're going to try to rectify this violence that was set upon a large population in our country within the last 60 years, we have to start doing radical invitations to get those audience to feel comfortable coming back to the theater. It's not just about ticket prices, it's not just about location, it's not just about subject matter, because look at any Marvel movie or before Black Panther, they all had white protagonists.

Yet, Black people were going to see them in droves. Latino people were going to see them in droves. That's because Marvel has always invited whoever wanted to come see their movies to see them. The theater cannot say the same of itself. I'm trying to do the work of reengaging Black audiences to feel comfortable just populating a theater the way we did in the 1920s, when the major musicals and plays and reviews on Broadway were all by Black artists, something you could read about more if you want to at a website me and my friends made called blackworkbroadway.com. God, I just plug that so hard.

[laughter]

I was like where did that come from? I'm really obsessed with the seeder history. When the programming of theater in America shifted from having a really rich, excited space for Black audiences, a lot of the times when they were for Black affinity plays, to the 1980s and '90s when Black audiences tuned off from the theater and stopped feeling as invited, because I think it had a lot to do with Reagan.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In October, I talked with Ruben Santiago Hudson, and I'd been to see his play the night before. It was the first time I'd been to Broadway since the start of the pandemic. I remembered that discomfort that I have sometimes as a Black audience member in a play that is addressing race, and sometimes there are these moments of humor, and I'm sitting in a predominantly white space or highly integrated space as this one was.

White folks laughing at some jokes where I really wanted to be like, "Nope, nope. Nope, not you right now." I'm wondering about on nights that are not Blackout nights, or maybe even more so on Blackout nights where you nonetheless have white patrons, what you make of the reactions of white audience members, maybe particularly to the moments of humor?

Jeremy O Harris: It's crazy, and Melissa, I'm going to invite you to the Blackout, because it's really wild to see how free Black people are when they are away from the white gaze. I have never in my life thought anything that might feel like a show that could go up at the Apollo or something that would be akin to the energy I felt when I was nine years old and went to see the Kings of Comedy with my mom. When I watch Slave Play with a fully Black audience, it was like I'd made the funniest thing that had ever existed until it was it.

That was wild because oftentimes in the more mixed audiences that we have, you constantly see white people and Black people checking each other to see if it's okay for them to laugh, or who's laughing and how they're laughing. I think that's a great metaphor for what moving through America is often like. Sitting in that audience in that integrated audience is what it's like, it's like we don't know how to dance and in step with this person who's our forced partner to grow. It's like we're cotillion, and they've told us that we're supposed to partner with that other person, but neither of us really wants to dance with the other.

I feel like one of the things I like about the Blackout audience is that it's a home for Black people who never felt really, really, really at home in the theater, and definitely don't feel comfortable in this home that's not theirs to engage with a play like Slave Play that's asking so much of audiences. Whereas what I like about the nights where everyone's there is that when everyone's there, it's doing the thing the play says to do in that one stage direction, where it's not allowing anyone the chance to feel comfortable.

As much as I want to give Black people as many opportunities feel comfortable with my work as possible, I also noticed the work functions better if we're in as much of space of discomfort as possible. I think a part of that discomfort is being like, "Why did that white person laugh right there?" As in, that white person would be like, "Why did you laugh right there?" Like us trying to navigate this history because it's a shared history. It's not a history that one of us holds, and that entanglement that Slave Play is attempting to navigate.

It's like what does it mean that we both inherited these traumas, and yet only one of us is constantly brought to the table to be the main engager with that trauma. White people's engagement with the trauma of slavery is generally to say, I don't want to see that, or that's too much. We see that all the time. The amount of people who saw Slave Play said they love Slave Play in 2019, in 2018, in 2017. Yet still, we're destroyed, wretched by the "racial reckoning" of 2020, makes me feel crazy. I was like, "I thought we had already talked about a lot of the stuff."

I gave you guys, literally half the books that people were saying that they needed to read, that they bought, and probably had collecting dust on a bookshelf somewhere because they never opened it. Those were all the books I told people to read when I did my play in 2017. I've had a resource list for my play since the play first one up in the air through the workshop. Yet, some of those same people were still like, "Have you read White Fragility? Everyone must buy it now."

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm sorry. I have to laugh because I really had to go reexamine pretty much my entire adulthood right in that moment in 2020, because I was like, I spent a lot of time laboring really hard for a decade, made a whole TV show every weekend. Was anyone listening? No one was listening. Great, no problem.

Jeremy O Harris: It felt like the amount of people were-- When I brought this up, people were like, "But Jeremy, it's just so different." I'm like, "What made this different than Freddie Gray?"

Melissa Harris-Perry: Nothing different.

Jeremy O Harris: I was like, "Is this different than Ferguson? Is different than--?" The only thing I can think that makes it different is that the one major character shifted. I honestly think that people put a lot of things on George Floyd, we say his name a lot. We advocate, or we invoke him a lot, but I think Amy Cooper is the reason. I think that there's something really-- I think that's what Slave Play was always doing right with the Alana and the Jim, and the Patricia, and the Dustin.

This play was presenting every white Hillary voter and all of their racial blind spots. These are not people who've done anything necessarily wrong, they're just not listening to Black people. They're not able to listen to their partners. That was the core of the play that I was trying to do. I think that's what we witnessed why people try to wrestle with over the last year and a half.

I now think they have fatigued again. I think it'll be a lot more in media soon, and people will have some other racial reckoning that reminds them of their whiteness and my blackness and your blackness in three years, but maybe not. Maybe the work will keep going, and will keep going in a good direction. It's sometimes hard when I have people who literally were alive during James Baldwin and Martin Luther King tell me that they didn't know certain things about the world until I wrote them in a play.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Very last one because I can't let you out with just talking about the stage work. Just one beat on Zola. I think now understanding you as a double Gemini with Taurus tendencies who likes to stir the pot a bit, I understand a bit more just how wickedly weird and wonderful that film is. Talk to me a little bit about how you approach screenwriting, particularly as something that is certainly informed by your dramatic writing, but was also a very different genre.

Jeremy O Harris: It's a wildly different genre. I don't think that I would have been able to endeavor it at all, had I not been guided by the genius that is Janicza Bravo. Janicza was a director and writer that I admired so much. It felt like being someone that was obsessed with the Beatles getting asked to play with them, or someone obsessed with Tina Turner being asked to open. That's the environment I was in with her where she was like, "I see your talent. I think you're an amazing writer. Now, let me teach you how to do it in this manner." We took our-- Because Janicza also was a theater maker.

We took our love of theater, and we brought that to how we met the text of Asia's Twitter thread. We decided in that moment, we would not treat this Twitter thread,like anything other than an epic poem or a piece of dramatic iambic pentameter. We engaged it that way. I think that's why people feel so electrified by our screenplay and the film when they see it. Because you wouldn't know which way is up or which way is down in that same way you feel when you come out of the Royal Court Theater, after seeing a Caryl Churchill play, or a new adaptation of a Chekhov Having those sensibilities with the expertise of Janicza is how I was able to navigate doing my first screenplay.

I have to say, screenwriting is a beast, it's a true beast. I think that it's a beast I'm really excited to keep wrestling. I love that it's beat me up, knocked the wind out of me a couple of times over the last year and a half, because I can write a play in my sleep. I can beat a play, but the financial restraints, the financial excesses, the many, many, many voices one is accountable to film and television makes it a really different place. Because I'm a stubborn Gemini, with Taurus tendency, then no, I'm going to keep wrestling with it for a long time until I move on to some other bigger beast.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That love of learning and running up a new learning curve with that challenge sounds you got a little Libra you too. [chuckles]

Jeremy O Harris: Well, I was raised by one.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There you go. There it is. [laughs] Jeremy O Harris is the Tony-nominated playwright of Slave Play, and co-screenwriter of Zola. Thanks so much for talking with me.

Jeremy O Harris: Thank you so much, Melissa. This is amazing.

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