Hello! I’ve been up to a lot: some exciting changes for season 2 of TV, I Say (and the return of this weekly newsletter), working on a show, writing some things, and doing some shows. You know how it is. I’ve been busy. But in my free time, you can still find me on twitter because I absolutely always need a place to scream my TV opinions into the void. I am a TV and culture writer/addict and twitter is just pure lines of some of the best and worst takes you will ever find. I’ve fallen in love with shows I never would’ve watched because of tweets. My tweets are the sole reason a lot of people even watched The Big Leap.
Basically, I am always happy to see the thing people are talking about. I think everyone should always see all the things, even if they’re bad. I still watch Grey’s Anatomy, so I’d never tell anyone to stop watching something no matter how wild it gets. Bad reviews and viewer frustration only make me more curious. That’s half the fun of watching shows like Euphoria, the Gossip Girl reboot and Emily in Paris: They have wonderful moments, but we also all openly enjoy how not good these shows can be.
And this is where everything begins. While some see twitter as a bacchanal of unimportant, nonsensical opinions all fucking each other (me), others see twitter as a legitimate forum that has the power to crush their egos. A few months ago, I noticed people tweeting a lot about some show that won a bunch of Tonys or something. It was called Slave Play. I was sort of aware of the show from the news it got when Rihanna held the curtain. I knew celebrities saw it and it was considered controversial. I never thought it sounded interesting enough to read about though.
The twitter streets were hot: some people seemed to think it was a play about actual slavery which sparked the “I’m tired of slavery time stories!” debate (Slave Play is not, technically, about “slavery times.”) Some said no self-respecting black person would ever see Slave Play. Others said it was a play that uses black trauma to center white guilt. Some people said it was incredibly black and that’s why it was so controversial and didn’t get the awards it deserved (I would later be corrected by a friend - Slave Play did not win any Tonys, it was actually the most losing play in Tony history).
Personally, I love the theater. I’m a goddamn musical nerd. My dream in life is to do a TV adaption of Falsettos. I went to Williams College because William Finn and Stephen Sondheim did. I was a Grade-A, master electrician techie all-black wearing high school theater kid. I am always down to see a play. I am the friend who will go to your kid’s high school play or your weird boyfriend’s community theater performance. So, when I see drama over drama, I run into the burning theater.
Like I said, I didn’t know anything about Slave Play. I chose to go in without reading a synopsis or any reviews. I knew it was about BDSM, therapy and something with slavery. I was very aware of Jeremy O. Harris though. If you noticed a connecting thread in the three shows I mentioned above, it’s him. I knew him as the producer of Euphoria. I knew him as the person in Emily in Paris and Gossip Girl. I knew him as the guy who gave some white kid on TikTok money for eating a carrot or something. I knew him as the guy who got called out for allegedly bringing underage girls around that rapist who wrote on Girls. When I heard that he had apparently written the most controversial play of all time, I was…well surprised and tweeted as much. Thus began Jeremy’s love affair with me.
Jeremy’s response was “When did I say those things were deep?” Which I thought was a weird thing to say about shows you make and I had no idea why he felt it was worth responding to me, but I figured he just wanted me to know that his theatric expectations don’t align with the expectations he has for television. Fair enough. So, I decided to hit up some editors to see if anyone would be interested in a TV critic’s take on the “most controversial” play by a rising star in TV. One person said yes and they bought my ticket to the show’s first night of previews in Los Angeles, which was a few weeks away.
In the meantime, the second season of Euphoria premiered and dominated twitter. While I make a lot of jokes about Euphoria, I mostly like the show, but I get why it can be frustrating. What I do respect is that Sam Levinson creates the work, talks about the work after each episode and then he steps away so the fans can create their own theories and experiences. It’s more a show we all have fun talking about at this point. It surprised me though, that Harris couldn’t stop engaging with tweets and tiktoks about the show. He took it very seriously for a show most people saw as Fancy Degrassi or a Music Video With More Vibes.
Then came the tweet that made a million TV critics roll their eyes:
Enough amazing and brilliant TV critics tore this tweet to shreds that I don’t even need to go into why the “cinematic mind” stuff was so silly. But, again, out of all of those critics he could’ve directly addressed, I was the only one he went out of his way to try and have a valid conversation with. Then he tried to play it all of as a joke, but that didn’t stop him from insulting some of those same critics…again…as a joke. Although none of us was particularly bothered by him saying some silly shit other silly people have said before.
I was due to see Slave Play three days after this whole Gesamtkunstwerk thing happened and that made my editor even more excited. I had already tweeted that I was going and Jeremy even hit me up to say he knew I already had tickets, but he wanted to offer me tickets to the Black Out performance that Friday (for some reason, he tweeted screenshots of this sad conversation where I am mostly just polite and disinterested). This is when a special screening and afterparty is held for invite-only black VIPs. I said I’d love to attend. Then I made a lot of Gesamtkunstwerk jokes and didn’t hear from him for a bit. The day RSVPs were due, he finally got back to me and I managed to get my RSVP and +1 registered under the wire. I thought it would only add to my piece if I wrote about the difference experiencing the show with a black audience versus a white one.
I had an extra ticket and offered it to some people I knew who were interested, but also didn’t want to spend money on the show. My friend, Kyra, decided to come with me to the opening of previews. Before the show even started, we noticed how old and white the crowd was. We knew this would probably be the case because that’s just how the theater is. Sadly, she couldn’t go to the Black Out show on Friday, so we were stuck in a sea of white people. Something she chose to comment on:
You would think Jeremy would understand this. He started the Black Out shows because, in his own words at the Black Out show I attended, a black female friend of his commented on feeling uncomfortable watching with a mostly white audience. We felt the same way. But, no. Instead, he tried to attack Kyra’s credentials as a writer for a Hulu show by saying “since white people mostly use Hulu, her show was for white people” (people quickly pointed out to him you cannot measure audience metrics on one show that way) and disregarded the rest of her resume. Again, I thought it was weird Jeremy was wasting time on the first night of his show in Los Angeles coming for black women on twitter, but this sparked an unending back-and-forth where Jeremy and the woman who inspired Slave Play simply would not leave us alone.
I mean, okay, of course I made some real crass jokes. I am also a comedian. But we never intended for this to end with the woman who is listed as the inspiration for Slave Play’s main black female character telling me this:
What a horrible Black History Month.
I was still due to see the Black Out performance that Friday and well, now I was even more excited. I tweeted some of my initial thoughts on the show’s dynamics, staging and lighting. Honestly, I didn’t feel like there was much else to say about the actual play. I didn’t find it taboo or controversial. I’ve worked as a professional domme and I’m not shocked at mere mentions of Fetlife or dildos like the majority white audiences Jeremy relies on to call the show controversial. I thought it needed an editor and it felt like a senior project. I kind of thought it was funny I could summarize what so many people disliked about the show for the first time in only a few tweets. I was still curious to see how a black audience would react, so I got ready to go back to Slave Play that Friday.
Seeing it with a black audience was very different. It was way more fun. Way more people walked out and at one point, people started saying “Boo Tomato” out loud. I tweeted my first thoughts again. Setting off another round of Jeremy and his Potty Piss Muse subtweeting me before outright @-ing me and saying I had helped him sell tickets and sent the show on a sold out run. He also said he should pay me for the publicity (he never paid me, I don’t think it sold like he says).
By this point, I thought it was just super weird this guy was posting screenshots of our interactions, constantly checking for my tweets even though he doesn’t follow me, subtweeting me, his friend threatened to get me fired (from comedy?), was coming for my friends and trying to discredit them all while also saying I was helping him (Ok? so then calm down and just venmo me? I am a culture writer, I never said people shouldn’t see your shitty play?). Also, it is true that I helped: The show didn’t get much press outside of my tweets. Certainly I didn’t see anyone else write about it other than some white guy.
And so, I did what any comedian and culture critic would do in this situation: I roasted his ass. For a few days I tweeted the available number of tickets for each show because Jeremy claimed it was on its way to a sold out run thanks to the controversy I stirred up. (While the CTG site says the last two performances are sold out, there have been plenty available for resale on Stubhub). I was merciless and also very funny.
Eventually, it got the attention of The Daily Beast. Jeremy could not stop referencing me in his tiktoks. He went out of his way to say the opinions I only tweeted were disingenuous and that I needed to read a book. Even though I raised legitimate points a lot of people seemed to agree with, by this point, he couldn’t see me as anything other than a villain who had chipped at just the right insecurity to make him only see rage (I would not have made the DePaul jokes if I’d known he got cut from the DePaul theater program - that was harsh).
And personally? I was tired of all of this. Look, I’m a TV person, I move on from shit pretty quickly. By the end of February, I didn’t care about any of this anymore. I saw a bad play, I talked about it and for some reason a guy who should just be like…doing anything else wouldn’t leave me alone about it. I told my editor I didn’t even feel comfortable writing about it anymore and I’d rather take the kill fee and not publish anything (which still covered the cost of the tickets!!). If Jeremy thought I was doing this for attention or as a PR stunt where he bullies black women to get attention, why play into it?
I guess I see why he wanted my approval, but on my end, it wasn’t really worth tying my name to his insecurity-driven mess. In the CV of pieces I’m honored to have published, I’m proud of myself for denying Jeremy a spot. I denied podcast interviews about it. I figured, at most, if I did write more, it would just be for this: my newsletter where I also breakdown Darcey and Stacey and 90 Day Fiancé because that’s about the level of depth Slave Play requires. And that’s not a dig, I fucking love 90 Day Fiancé. Anyway, my point is: I moved on.
But then Jeremy did another goddamn interview where he couldn’t keep my name out of his mouth, so here we are. Still, he called me disingenuous even though the writer pointed out what many had: I encouraged more people to see it because I wanted them to see it, whether they’d hate it or not. I truly believe art like Slave Play is only elevated when white people keep it from the masses. The more people who see that show, the more people who will see how thin it is. But, what bothered me more was that the interviewer said they understood “my conclusion.”
This was odd to me because…I hadn’t actually published my conclusion anywhere. In the midst of this being either Twitter beef-entertainment for blog sites, supposed PR or “disingenuous twitter clout,” my actual criticism and voice had been lost. Certainly, Jeremy and I haven’t spoken since I realized his DMs are apparently just screenshot fodder. None of the journalists or interviewers who wrote these pieces reached out to me for comment or to make sure they had my conclusion or thoughts right. Fuck, they didn’t even see all of my tweets about the show! None of them mentioned the brilliant points my friend Kyra made as a sex educator and survivor advocate. They were only interested in the ability of my tweets to stir up drama.
After seeing how the black women who voiced opinions about the play were used, I couldn’t be shocked that Slave Play is the work of a black man who reduces black women’s rape and trauma for the benefit of white audiences’ growth and education. It isn’t taboo. It isn’t triggering. It isn’t controversial. It is simply every day.
And well, now you know the long background that has made me so over this subject! But FUCK IT, let’s go. Here is my actual breakdown of my experience and thoughts on Slave Play.
This won’t take nearly as long as everything that got us here and honestly, my first few twitter threads do sum it up nicely.
At no point does Slave Play ask us to believe the BDSM therapy it suggests is beneficial to the black participants. In fact, Slave Play doesn’t suggest much of its black participants outside of white-centered stereotypes. Kaneisha is the Angry Black Woman with mostly unexplored resentment and internalized self-hatred (She only feels special when a white man finds her attractive). Gary finds himself when he tells a white man he’s the prize. A writer interested in exploring blackness would ask Gary why he needs to be a white man’s prize. Slave Play would rather spend time reprimanding Gary’s white-but-not-white partner for not seeing him as one. Phillip is a tragic mulatto who only feels black when he is cucking a white man’s wife.
How these three black people found themselves at a group session for interracial couple slave-based therapy is what I think most black viewers would want to know. The one white female comments that this Yale-approved study was in the New Yorker so white people being fooled by it seems fair, but what does it say about Kaneisha, Gary and Phillip that they looked at BDSM therapy created within the approval of systemic whiteness would be beneficial? If my black friend told me they were going to Goop for advice on BDSM interracial dating, I would say “What the fuck is wrong with you? Why?”
And while Jeremy told me I should go read some books about BDSM, he failed to realize that I went into to student debt at a liberal arts school, baby. I got my degrees bringing porn stars and Tristen Taormino to campus. I have read The Black Body in Ecstasy and other works by Jennifer C. Nash (these are the reading suggestions Jeremy recommended).
Anyway, as an ex-pro domme, I get that BDSM can be a therapeutic practice. It can be revolutionary. And nearly every piece of reading Jeremy suggests would agree that the conditions he lays out in Slave Play aren’t meant to be seen as good, which is what he says in his interview. Those readings give us an idea of how BDSM can work that way: when it is removed from systemic structures of whiteness and traditional power dynamics.
Slave Play instead sets this to practice in the worst of circumstances and then seeks credit for shallow mentions of fetlife, pegging and cucking. While the white characters come to some realization or form of growth at the end of Slave Play, its never clear if its black characters realize the conditions they’re in. When Kaneisha thanks her husband for raping her, should this really be seen as a moment of agency if we know the therapy that led to it was created by Yale? Are we meant to question Kaneisha and see her rape as a “punishment”? If so, why is she the only one who has to face a reckoning?
Why don’t Gary or Phillip get their “come to Jesus” moment? Why is the show’s lone darkskinned black woman left to carry the entire weight of the show’s final act? Most aren’t even sure if what happens in the third act should be considered rape. During both performances I thought I heard “Stop” and only realized she uses the safe word when I read the script later.
Slave Play is too distracted with whiteness to ever make its black female character’s arc clear.
What was most odd to me though, was that we never see the black characters in commune with each other. They never nod at each other. They never really acknowledge each other. At one point, Gary mispronounces Kaneisha’s name. At another point, Kaneisha makes fun of the way one of her black teachers pronounced the word “afflicted.” With a white audience, this line got a laugh. At the Black Out show, someone yelled “That’s a word, baby!”
Slave Play never interrogates its black characters in this way because they are merely there for the development of the white characters and white audience. Kaneisha has to be raped so her white husband can see he’s the demon she knew he was. The audience has to watch and literally see themselves reflected in these acts (there’s literally a giant mirror on stage, which Jeremy says is for the audience to see themselves, because, like I said, this is some college-level bullshit). There is a moment when a red “demon light” is held over the audience, a moment for white viewers to recognize the demon within themselves. With a white audience, this moment (and most of act 3) was met with silence.
I would say that exercise absolutely failed in a room full of black people who could not reflect the color red and perhaps realized in that moment that they weren’t supposed to be in those seats. Slave Play is more interested in clever references to Yale, the theater being “no place for masks,” and more shit that makes white people feel smart and in on the joke. If black people are meant to feel any similar sense of relatability, it happens in moments like a white partner speaking over their black partner or the way white people are just generally annoying. Something else is missing though; the show never really pierces through the veil. When we think we Kaneisha’s actual motivations might be revealed, a Rihanna song plays instead.
At the end of the day, Slave Play should be called Race Play. It is more concerned with whiteness above anything else.
Also, the dialogue is dense and I absolutely hated the staging. The moments that should’ve felt intimate didn’t land on such an immense green stage. Act 2 is so long. It’s just a show that needed a damn editor (like this long ass piece). There is a pretty good like, 30 minutes in act 2. I tweeted so much of this already and I never wanna talk about this fucking play again. The lighting was good. The Act 3 stage change was great. The actors did a serviceable job with such dense dialogue. The direction was lacking, felt like someone who thought they could rely on the dialogue when they couldn’t.
Oh, also if Jeremy really wanted to invite black people to the show, he’d invite black community theaters and student groups like other black shows on Broadway have done in the past. Instead he invites people on social media who will get the show pictures, engagement and clout. He knows why that is: it is a play that only passes the test of this age of social media. Years from now, people will look at this play and be embarrassed by it.
Oh and the Euphoria ending was bad so that whole Gesamtkunstwerk thing is even funnier now.
If you want to pay me for writing all of this shit because god knows JEREMY WON’T DO IT, my venmo is theashleyray and my cashapp is ashleyrayharris.