There are few people present in the Almeida theatre offices in London when Jeremy O Harris walks in on a Monday evening in March. He is wearing Gucci head-to-toe: a multicoloured check wool suit and, over it, a grey monogram coat embellished with small jewels that glitter intensely under the ceiling’s studio lights. Is this an everyday look, I wonder. “It’s the first day of rehearsal for Daddy,” Harris, 32, explains, “so it feels like a good way to be like: ‘Let’s get jazzy.’ It was also on loan so I have to give it back tomorrow.”
Although we are indeed speaking on the first day of rehearsals for Daddy, which went on to open at the Almeida last month, it’s not Harris’s first time bringing the play to the UK. Original plans for it to debut in 2020 were quickly halted by the pandemic. “We were doing the play here two years ago today,” he says. “I think me and Danya [Taymor, the director] were downstairs with Rupert [Goold, artistic director] being like: ‘America just shut down the NBA, I think it’s probably gonna be game over for theatre.’” Sure enough, the Almeida theatre closed on 16 March 2020, and Harris found himself stuck in the UK, living in a flat in London until August. “I got very comfortable being in a foreign city during a very foreign time,” he says.
Despite a global standstill, Harris’s star continued to rise in the United States, with success meeting him in off-stage platforms. In early 2020, it was announced that he had signed on to become a co-producer of teen drama Euphoria, and was developing a pilot show for HBO. He also co-wrote the screenplay for the 2021 film Zola, based on a viral Twitter thread about a waitress and stripper in Detroit.
Now, three years after Daddy debuted in 2019 in New York, Harris is finally ready to meet a British audience for the first time. While he is town for Daddy, it was Slave Play, which premiered in New York in 2018, that saw him explode on to the scene as one of the most talked-about and provocative playwrights of his generation. The show has been a runaway success, with Rihanna, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton, Madonna and Gloria Steinem seen in attendance. Its February to March 2022 west coast run at Center Theatre Group grossed $1.4m (£1m) in five weeks, despite offering almost 5,000 free and discounted tickets.
Billed as an “antebellum fever dream”, Slave Play sees three interracial couples participate in “Sexual Performance Therapy”, comprising slavery role play intended to improve the intimacy and sexual pleasure of each partnership through reckoning with intergenerational racial trauma. Naturally, such a premise attracted significant commotion, including a petition signed by 6,400 people calling for it to be shut down. “I thought it was hilarious,” Harris says, nearly leaping out of his seat in laughter. “And crazy. Because most of the people who signed the petition had never seen the play. The petition happened when the play had maybe 30 performances off-Broadway, and the number of people who signed the petition was more than the theatre could have possibly held.”
A recurring problem Harris feels he faces is audiences forming conclusions about his plays before even purchasing a ticket. “I think a lot of people’s responses to the play are based on projection,” he continues. “That’s why there’s a mirror on stage in that play. A lot of my plays have mirrors in them – this play [Daddy] has a pool in it. A pool is a very large mirror. And I think that I like to make work that deals with psyches to such a degree that people’s own psyches start to battle the work as they walk out of the theatre.”
Daddy is less explicitly about race than Slave Play, but the audience perception of the relationship between Franklin, a young Black debutante artist, and Andre, an older, wealthy white art collector, is understandably shaped by a US context in which race and gay interracial relationships in particular are politically charged. Last year, the wealthy Democratic donor Ed Buck was sentenced to a minimum 20 years in prison after the fatal meth overdoses of two young African American men in his home. Did Buck’s crimes warp US perceptions of Daddy? “I think that if people needed the spectre of Ed Buck to know that there have been histories of predation of young Black men by older white men, older men in general, then I don’t know how to help them,” says Harris. “My hope is that people are coming to the play with these questions in their mind about any sort of entanglement that looks like that. Because that is part of the engine of the play.” Is Daddy therefore a study of predation? “No,” he answers assertively. So what is the dynamic? “I would say: see the play.” He prefers that audiences come into his shows blind. “I love that. It’s my ideal. Because then you’re just coming with whatever you’ve projected on to the three lines you’ve read about it on the internet.”
Harris grew up in a military family in the southern US, eventually settling in Virginia. He became engrossed in theatre and literature from a young age, finding that they equipped him with the intellectual armour to combat bullying. Although he says that his work is not autobiographical, it is informed by “trauma”, which he describes as “wildly important” for the formation of his stories. “Looking through my histories and my wounds is the only thing that really excites me,” he says. “And finding humour in those things really excites me. And stretching them out and reshaping them into other things is really cool. Otherwise I’m just living with some wound that disfigures me in certain ways.”
Having broken through so young, and with stage plays that were written at the beginning of his career reaching international attention, does Harris ever feel he is defined by works that he has emotionally moved on from? He gracefully dismisses the idea. “I think that would be like asking if Tennessee Williams should be upset that he’s defined by The Glass Menagerie or A Streetcar Named Desire. I think a lot of artists write exhilarating work in their early 20s because we write best when we’re hungry. But later there’s a beautiful thing that can happen for a mid- or late-career artist where, because they’re fed, they’re able to write with even more nuance. Nuance is what we get from older writers, and what we get from younger writers is brazen ambition that rips a hole in the fabric of the universe.”
Slave Play’s success means that Harris has been offered the resources to “make his wildest dreams come true”; Daddy is worth seeing for its use of an infinity pool alone. (“Were there an award for best supporting body of water, this highly expressive pool would be a shoo-in,” wrote the New York Times.)
Still, he doesn’t meet theatres purely with gratitude but with real, rigorous challenge. He doesn’t shy away from the fact that his audience at the Almeida will be overwhelmingly white and middle class. “I do not want to play into a history that denies Black people equal footing getting into these doors,” he says. “There’s not a history of doing a lot of Black work here,” he says, “and we’ve had really great discussions and really intense outreach in order to change not only what’s happening for this play but what will happen for other plays in the future.”
In 2021, Harris withdrew Slave Play from its LA run at the Center Theatre Group in protest at a lack of female playwrights in the season’s lineup. He takes this duty towards Black female artists seriously: prior to this withdrawal, Harris had created $50,000-worth of commissions for new works by Black female playwrights at the New York Theater Workshop. Does he now have certain terms and conditions for theatres before he works with them? “I think I’m figuring that out now. I’m still so young, and this is very much the beginning of my career, and I’m starting to learn how to use my privilege to the best of its ability.”
As for the future of Harris’s work, it is without boundaries. Despite his HBO deal, he doesn’t intend to abandon theatre anytime soon; he sees all of these artistic mediums as sitting side by side in his career. “If you look at some of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century, even Caryl Churchill had radio plays and plays happening at the same time. Debbie tucker green has written for television. Alice Birch wrote Normal People. I hope that I’m able to have a healthy career anywhere my brain takes me.” His career is certainly in rude health, and his ability to “cause all this conversation” (to borrow a line from Beyoncé) cannot be overstated. “No one wants to start a production with a whisper,” he says. “I hope that the play invites a lot of excitement.”
Daddy is at the Almeida theatre, London, until 30 April.
