REVIEWS: “SLAVE PLAY” AND “THE SOUND INSIDE”

REVIEWS: “SLAVE PLAY” AND “THE SOUND INSIDE”

Two new American plays now on Broadway provide food for thought at a time when the commercial theater is dominated by revivals and musicals. Slave Play and The Sound Inside succeed to varying degrees.

When you take your seat at Slave Play, now at the Golden Theatre, the first thing you notice is a wall of mirrors facing you from the back of the stage. Then with a reflection of a Southern plantation, you encounter a buxom black woman dressed as a slave twerking to a Rhiannon song as a white overseer solicits sex from her. Next, a white property owner orders her “house slave” to serenade her on the violin as she produces a black dildo for some bedroom action. Finally, a white man and black man tussle in a sex game that leads one of them to orgasm.

Then suddenly there is a halt to the action. It turns out all three puzzling, anachronistic episodes have been part of a group Antebellum Sex Treatment Therapy session.  Facilitated by a pair of female psychologists, one white and one black, the couples have been brought together to explore the role of racism in their sexual dysfunction.  There is some humor as the psychologists, caught up in pseudo-scientific academic jargon, have to adjust to exercises that don’t play out according to their preconceived notion.  It seems that they have their own relationship with its attendant tensions.

The script, by Jeremy O. Harris, a graduate of the Yale MFA Playwriting Program, is both provocative and problematic. Like the mirrors onstage, it forces us to consider the way racism and sex are inherently power plays. The audience at the performance I saw was younger than most Broadway audiences, which would seem to welcome topical plays. The dialogue is snappy and the acting sharp (give credit to a fine cast and director Robert O’Hara), but the characters are all archetypes. Whether it’s George Bernard Shaw in Arms and the Man or Suzan-Lori Parks in Topdog/Underdog, the best examples have three-dimensional characters. Dramaturgically, the therapy session in Slave Play drags on a bit long, and a final scene, between the black woman and the white man in real life, doesn’t resolve the issues of the play. As it ended, I respected it for some of its elements and its intention but was left with reservations.

Yale also figures in The Sound Inside.  Mary-Louise Parker plays a creative writing professor at Yale, and in the lengthy monologue which opens the play she describes her love of language. She also recalls her mother’s wasting away from cancer in her 50’s. Now 53 herself and unmarried, she, too, has been diagnosed with a form of metastatic cancer, but she is determined to continue teaching. One day a freshman in one of her classes, played by Will Hochman, drops in unexpectedly at her office. He is passionate and opinionated about literature, and, he announces, he’s writing a book. While she’s not sure what to make of him, she agrees to meet him again the next day.

Thus begins the pas de deux created by playwright Adam Rapp.  With writing that is as lean and precise as the literature they both love, they sometimes address the audience as well as each other. Is it a coincidence that Hochman’s character is called Christopher Dunne, reminding us of John Donne?  Donne’s poetry was the life work of Vivian Bearing, another professor facing cancer in Margaret Edson’s brilliant play, Wit.

Parker, who’s shone on Broadway in Proof, Heisenberg, and The Snow Goose, as well as “Weeds” and other television and movie roles, is given the role of a lifetime in The Sound Inside and makes the most of it. Each phrase, each inflection is totally credible.  Hochman is very much her match as a character who verges on the obnoxious, but is talented, and, in the end, enigmatic. How she deals with her cancer diagnosis – and his response – is a source of surprise. Director David Cromer, who has brought out the best in plays like The Band’s Visit and Our Town, polishes this jewel as well. The Sound Inside is spellbinding and resonates in every way.

Photo by Jeremy Daniel of "The Sound iNSIDE."