A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play

Kaneisha lets out a scream that sends the gag falling out of her mouth and her body shivering from groin to skull.

Kaneisha: Starbucks! Starbucks! Starbucks! 

Kaneisha falls off the bed and begins to cry. It is a full-bodied, all-hands-on-deck type of cry.

Jim looks at Kaneisha, not sure what came over him, not sure why he did what he did, as the last light of the Virginia dusk begins to fade away, and a slight breeze knocks their window against the pane. 

Jim begins to crawl over to Kaneisha slowly when suddenly the all-hands-on-deck cry becomes a guttural laugh. Kaneisha is overcome.

Slave Play (1)

“What moment made you want to say ‘Starbucks’?” The question verges toward the silly, even in this context. Within Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play though, “Starbucks” resists our caffeinated associations. It functions here as a sexual safe word—a way for the characters to immediately stop their role play and return to reality. During what initially appears in the first act as a series of racially charged sexual exploits on a slave plantation—including a white mistress taking advantage of the young Black man working in her household, and an overseer awkwardly seducing a Black woman—“Starbucks” reveals that the whole scenario is a setup constructed by a pair of Yale graduate students to help three interracial couples work through their relationship issues. These characters spend the play parsing out baggage unique to these interracial relationships through an unconventional variation of therapeutic role play while attempting to name and interrogate complications around race. As the play hurtles toward the climactic third act—which includes an ambiguous and violent sexual interaction between Kaneisha, the central Black female character, and her white male partner, Jim, described in the stage direction excerpted above—whatever meaning this exchange and the use of “Starbucks” produces seems ambiguous and uncertain. This unsettled question remained in the air as the show concluded and facilitators turned the attention of remaining participants toward thoughtful reflection and discussion. From its inception, Slave Play encouraged discourse with and for audiences, originating with informal interactions with trained moderators available in the lobby (designated with “talk to me about the play” buttons) at the New York Theatre Workshop, to more formal post-show talkbacks with some members of the cast and creative team on Broadway.(2) By the time I encountered Slave Play at the Taper Forum, audiences were invited to stay after the show for brief conversations with facilitators immediately afterwards. For our conversation, facilitators focused on a structured format scaffolded by the language of the play—in this case, using “Starbucks” to encourage us to contemplate moments of discomfort.

As I sat in the mostly empty auditorium of the Taper Forum in Los Angeles, I set aside my own tangled reactions to the play in favor of hearing from other audience members—given the play’s notoriety for its “shocking” material, I was curious how this self-selected community interpreted it. The premise of Slave Play, frequently alluded to in critical reviews and word-of-mouth reactions alike had been intriguing, but the humor seemed to land unevenly on the audience as the story swerved away from absurdity like a slow-motion car wreck towards the assault in act three. The conversation the play depicts involving gender, race, sexuality, and power, seemed to require a constant negotiation of audiences’ identities (in my case, white, queer, cis woman, as well as graduate student, theatre scholar, and dramaturg) in relation to the conflict, but as a whole the play resisted easy or prescriptive conclusions. For the bulk of the post-show talkback, the two facilitators led us through direct questions about these initial reactions, revelations, and what had stuck with us. Most responders prefaced their comments by clarifying that their responses “[weren’t] about the race thing, really,” and generally the conversation reflected how the discomfort of race, sexuality, and power intersected while watching the story. I noticed how these comments echoed larger observations about the play that I had seen in reviews and other publicity material,(3) identifying moments that appear “shocking” or “risky.” Finally, an older Black woman seated near the back of the auditorium raised her hand. “I would say I’m disappointed,” she began. “There was nothing here that was shocking, or…daring as everyone said this play would be. It was pretty typical. A white man having sex with a Black woman like she’s a slave? That’s expected.”(4)

While there are numerous points of entry into critical analysis of Slave Play, I emphasize this moment in the post-show audience discussion to highlight the tensions of satire, empathy, and the play’s dynamics of race. Slave Play toys heavily with expectations, ultimately breaking with the initial conceit as the characters reveal the circumstances of their role play. This reveal may produce a shocking and unexpected twist for audiences, but it also cultivates an empathetic gap where any initial feelings toward these characters evaporate upon realizing the situation is not what it seems. The humor at this twist nearly carries the second act, but the unpredictability makes it difficult to interpret the threat of harm toward Kaneisha in the final act. Indeed, much of the post-show discussion focused on the individual emotional experiences of audience members in relation to discomfort and knee-jerk reactions. While this approach offered participants a chance to self-reflect, the questions center around moments of shock, surprise, or unexpected emotion, effectively side-stepping what made the humor in the first two acts effective or necessary. In examining this shift, I inquire: at what point does Slave Play cease to function as a comedy?

I suggest that the initial framework of satire and humor for the first two acts significantly alters how this final moment of violence is understood in the context of its racial dynamics. All production choices of the first act lean into the comedy, including exaggerated movement that echoes the melodramatic. Given the sexual context, this blocking adds to the humor, with the wildly ridiculous postures heightening the sadomasochistic erotics. By the time the arc shifts to act three, the physical reaction of witnessing Kaneisha and Jim’s altercation seems to move from the humorous to the dangerous. In many ways, this particular altercation opens up potential for kinesthetic empathy, an “automatic, involuntary, kinesthetic response of one body to another” that produces a “feeling of sharing another person’s movement.”(5) Instead of strengthening an empathetic connection to a performance however, kinesthetic empathy can create an even further gap, since it is “limited by our own first-person experience,” where “what we simulate is our own experience of the movement, not the experience of the other. There will always be a gap between what we receive and what we experience.”(6) In negotiating this gap between a kinesthetic reaction to a staged act of violence and the use of satire, I build on Heather LaMarre’s framework of the cognitive load in satire—wherein audiences must refocus between what a satirist says and what message they initially intended.(7) In this case, Slave Play combines multiple components (including conversations on sexuality, race, and power) that increase the cognitive load to a such a point that it blurs the possibility of significant cultural critiques. (The focus of the post-show discussion highlighted this, as significantly more time was spent allowing audiences to self-reflect than to extrapolate toward larger thematic discussion.) Given the play’s portrayal of Kaneisha, this satirical imbalance reiterates rather than counteracts the hyperinvisibile status of Black women. In charting this trajectory, I position Slave Play within a larger context of satire to discuss the play’s use of humor and critique, followed by a more pointed analysis of Kaneisha addressing how her constellation of sexuality, gender, and race operates in conjunction with this satire. 

“A comedy of sorts”

“The moment you know [Slave Play] has no consideration for black women is in act 3 when kaneisha sys something like ‘the ancestors don’t mind that we lay with demons cuz they laid with demons too”  -@theeashleyray(8)

Ashley Ray, a Los Angeles-based polyamorous Black queer comedian/actor/writer,(9) received a significant amount of praise for her critique of Slave Play, especially the treatment of Kaneisha, as followers noted how Ray articulated their own similar distaste. Although responses to Slave Play seem to suggest a deep concern with the final violent act, numerous critical reviews focused on the discomfort of those watching and witnessing rather than empathizing with Kaneisha. “This is a demanding play,” wrote Constance Grady for Vox in her 2018 review. “[O]ne of the things it demands is the audience’s discomfort. But that discomfort is productive—and in the end, it brings its own satisfactions.”(10) Charles McNulty, who reviewed the Taper Forum production, noted that “each time I’ve seen the work, I’ve had a different reaction, which to me is a sign of the work’s complexity.”(11) These reviews contrasted heavily with Ray’s critiques, particularly as Ray focused much of her perspective on Kaneisha’s lack of involvement as a larger observation on Black women. Ray pointed to Kaneisha’s silence as an example of this lack of consideration, noting instances where “when we think we Kaneisha’s actual motivations might be revealed, a Rihanna song plays instead.”(12) Indeed, the fact that Kaneisha cannot articulate her emotions through words functions as a primary plot point, with musical interventions representing her experience of alexithymia. (Alexithymia, a condition where an individual has trouble identifying, experiencing, and understanding their own emotions, also seems to be a common experience for most of the Black characters in this play.) Indeed, throughout much of the “process” of act two, Kaneisha’s dialogue primarily consists of defining terms, concepts, or sensations for her fellow participants rather than investigating her own experience. By including the bulk of Kaneisha’s dialogue and action in the first act through role play, the understanding of her character is based heavily in the humor and satire framed in those moments—further complicating the reading of the final scene. Indeed, beyond the comment that Kaneisha and Jim’s relationship was “expected,” very little of the post-show discussion I attended even referenced Kaneisha or the violence at the end of act three, seeming to confirm Ray’s initial critique of her treatment.

In his introductory “Notes on Style,” Harris describes the world of the play as “a comedy of sorts” that “should be played as such.”(13) Harris does not include any additional guidance on this comedy, although many of the reviews include references to the “satiric” elements of the play, particularly within the overly academic second act. Sara Holdren’s Vulture review indicated that the play remained “ultimately humane,” even with its use of satire.(14) Amauta M. Firmino, who served as dramaturg for Slave Play from its origins at the Yale School of Drama through its Broadway premiere, recounted that this troubling between humor and discomfort served as an origin point for the play as well: “[Jeremy] was at a dinner party, and there’s…this conversation about a couple who, these two white people… They had been getting into role play in sex, and he had wanted to sort of…scare her or…surprise her or something. And people were joking at the dinner table about, like, pretending to rape his wife in a way, in role play, right?(15) This initial conversation led to questions of how power dynamics become visible in these moments, particularly if one partner is Black, as “[s]uddenly the power dynamics shift radically,” Firmino notes that “everyone is completely off their footing, right? And they’re no longer sure if they should be laughing or not, right?”(16) Unlike the first act, which elicited laughter through staging a sexual role play bordering on the ridiculous, the second act gets caught up in language and rhetoric, particularly as Téa and Patricia dance around buzzwords like “processing,” “interventions,” and “unpacking” as they lead the group therapy session. As the story moves into more emotionally charged dynamics in the third act, it seems to recreate this sensation of being “caught off foot,” uncertain of whether laughter is deserved. The slippery quality of satire only adds to the complicated nature of Slave Play—amid all the humor, the moments of critique get obscured.

In her studies on satire and political humor, Heather L. LaMarre defines it as a genre that “uses laughter as a weapon to diminish or derogate a subject and evoke towards it attitudes of amusement, disdain, ridicule, or indignation.”(17) At its heart, satire relies on mimicry in order to exploit other existing literary genres.(18) LaMarre’s initial study included categorizing two primary forms of satire: Horatian, which mimics comedy and comments on social and ethical problems by “[telling] the truth, laughing,” and Juvenalian, which mimics tragedy, and therefore includes a more definitive, bitter approach.(19) The goal of Horatian satire seeks to evoke laughter, which “calls audiences to laugh at the folly of political circumstance without giving much credence to arguments.”(20) This laughter can quickly reduce any commentary to “just a joke,” or “not serious,” in what LaMarre refers to as message discounting. Message discounting also exists in Juvenalian satire. However, the complexity of this genre makes interpretation more difficult. Juvenalian satire can create a stronger sense of urgency for the audience in processing and understanding the material—to reconcile the humor, the audience must negotiate a larger gap between what the satirist says and what they mean.(21)

The challenge for Slave Play comes in large part from Harris’s comedy—engaging with both Horatian and Juvenalian satire creates a sense of whiplash in attempting to understand how to read the emotionally charged situations. The description Harris provides suggests that some elements can (and perhaps should) emphasize the possibilities for comedy. Part one, which finds all characters in an elaborate antebellum sexual role play initially comes off as Horatian, allowing characters to “tell the truth” within their relationship dynamics “while laughing.” The second and third acts get decidedly more complicated, as it’s increasingly unclear whether Slave Play remains satirical, and if so, what exactly it satirizes. In this manner, Slave Play appears to move closer toward a Juvenalian satire.

Mirroring the same pitfalls that LaMarre illuminated in her comparison of the two, Slave Play requires more input and discernment for individual interpretation. Based on her studies in media and communication, LaMarre notes that “Horatian satire leaves agency in the hands of the message recipient while Juvenalian satire places most of the agency in the hands of the message producers.”(22) The more interpretation an audience must process to understand the argument, the less ability they have to properly analyze various angles of the critique. As the characters move through their “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy” experience, they shift from Horatian satire to Juvenalian—from humor that audiences can write off as “just a joke” to interactions so steeped in ambiguity—making it unclear whether we should laugh with a character or at them. By including an intense  and visceral assault on Kaneisha in this context, Slave Play seems to trouble what actions exist under the umbrella of Horatian satire’s “just a joke.”

Throughout her study, LaMarre identifies that the heavier cognitive load of Juvenalian satire makes it difficult to differentiate between humor and meaning. Ultimately, the audience becomes so preoccupied attempting to negotiate what the satirist says versus the actual intended message, they cannot fully articulate and analyze the actual arguments presented. As a result, LaMarre argues that these forms reduce the public’s motivation or ability “to think about the issues, assess the strength of relevant arguments, and attend to the political issues being presented,” and that consequently, “we are entering a world where opinion, sarcasm, innuendo, parody, and satire may have more influence on our democracy than facts and relevant truths.”(23) The stakes that LaMarre lays out become useful in examining Slave Play to understand both critical responses and the discourse the play seeks to engage. By moving from Horatian satire to Juvenalian satire to realism in such quick succession, Slave Play makes it difficult for audiences to parse out where one ends and another begins—and similarly, what the play considers “just a joke,” and what elements audiences should take seriously.

In this way, contextualizing Slave Play as satire also relies on the imagined contemporary “postrace” America. Ralina L. Joseph defines postrace as “a term used by race commentators to sometimes describe, sometimes decry, and sometimes imagine another racialized world. Postrace is far from neutral; indeed, as a racial ideology, it is so loaded and powerful that it delimited the iterative space for race critics in the Obama era.”(24) Joseph points to the pitfalls of imagining America as “postrace,” as the term suggests that race is no longer significant, implying that we have moved past discrimination based on race. Instead, Joseph argues that “postraciality remains embroiled in precisely what it claims not to be,” as it both contains the immediate awareness of racial difference and an acknowledgement of that race.(25) The implication that American politics and culture are beyond—or even past—race allows the discussion of race to seemingly disappear from the conversation. The conceit that these characters have arrived to unpack the dynamics of their interracial relationships hinges on this concept of postrace, as it both obscures and emphasizes racial power dynamics to underscore its satire.

For Kaneisha, this creates a position where her race simultaneously becomes the central focus in this dynamic while avoiding her particular challenges of Black womanhood. Kaneisha exists at the difficult intersection for Black women that Ralina Joseph describes as being “both hypervisible—objects of desire and scorn—and invisible entities who fail to register as significant.”(26) The hypervisibility that Joseph defines evolves further, as Amber Johnson argues that “stereotyping the body so much that the stereotypes become more visible, and thus believable,” to the point where these stereotypes even replace bodies in interpersonal interactions, rendering them hyperinvisible.(27) Recognizing this hyperinvisibility echoes the sentiments from the comment from the post-show discussion, pointing out what is “expected” in Kaneisha’s position. Kaneisha’s hyperinvisibility becomes another feature to question in negotiating satire—rather than addressing the actual harm represented, the question of what messages the play offered and what meaning it intended dominates the cognitive load.

Harris has described in interviews that his intention for the play centers on its function as “a litmus test for the audience that was engaging with it.”(28) Harris’s original goals included getting the audience talking about the relationships and dynamics they witnessed, which would seem to make it an excellent opportunity for dialogic empathy through this dramatic “litmus test.” Should the audience view Slave Play as a satire, it becomes necessary to identify the intentions of the satirist and the actual message.

Extrapolating from LaMarre’s work, the audience’s attention redirects in an attempt to analyze what they just saw rather than engaging with the actual themes present. For instance, rather than considering the emotional impact of racial inequalities, the audience gets preoccupied trying to discern if Jim assaulted Kaneisha. Returning to Ray’s observations, this shift makes it difficult to determine whether the play has any consideration for Kaneisha, and by extension, Black women generally, particularly as the action moves closer and closwer to realism. “I always see Slave Play as a tryptich,” Firmino described. “The first act is the artifice of the thing, right? It’s the role playing. And then the second act is a comedy of manners…that unmasks the role play and kind of talks about all of the issues behind it, and the third act is reality, right, the third act is the most real.”(29) In the realm of satire, especially satire that draws on sexual dynamics and kink, the line between assault and humor gets troublingly blurry.

“Why is whiteness so central to her identity?”

Kaneisha exists as both hypervisible and invisible in the space of the play, particularly by attempting to negotiate power in these moments of sadomasochistic roleplay. Sadomasochism broadly references relationships based on giving and/or receiving pain, ultimately relying on a binary power dynamic such as teacher/student, nurse/patient, or in the case of Slave Play, slave/master. Initially, Kaneisha’s participation (and Jim’s, for that matter) should allow her to “reengage intimately with white partners for whom they no longer receive sexual pleasure,” as Teá describes in act two.(30) The sadomasochistic dynamic between Jim and Kaneisha may edge toward a historical reenactment, where Harris evokes the actual legacy of Black women raped by white masters, but as many critics have pointed out, he does so in a way that reaffirms the structures of white supremacy. In an interview with Harris, Cate Young, a Black woman from the West Indies who articulates her racial identity alongside her history as a descendant of slaves, mentioned how Kaniesha’s lines during this interaction “bumped” for her, leading to questions about Kaneisha’s relationship to whiteness. “If it’s about whiteness in general,” Young described, “why is whiteness so central to [Kaneisha’s] identity? Why is interacting with whiteness in this intimate way so central to [her] identity that [she] can’t just not do that anymore when it doesn’t work for [her]?”(31) Ray followed a similar line of questioning in her review, noting that whatever liberation could exist through utilizing sadomasochism and kink occurs only “when it is removed from systemic structures of whiteness and traditional power dynamics,” a situation that does not exist in the world of this play.(32) As this scene appears as the closest to reality, it would seem that Kaneisha’s behavior affirms white supremacy rather than creating a liberatory act that critiques it.

In further exploring Kaneisha’s hyperinvisibility in this context, her roleplay highlights the difference between flesh and body as analyzed by Hortense Spillers. According to Spillers, the ability to differentiate between flesh and bodies allows for an expansion of understanding personhood. The flesh, which exists prior to the body, functions as “that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or that reflexes of iconography.”(33) The categorization of individual as body allows for the obscuring of violence, whereas the category of flesh allows for recognition of the marks and remembrances of the violence.(34) Spillers also suggests that the dynamic of body and flesh remains in flux throughout this narrative of enslavement, allowing space to exist as either a captive body, or as a site of crimes against the flesh. Each term offers separate possibilities in justifying racialized violence and the commodification of human life. The way that Harris evokes enslavement, both in the content of Slave Play and the title itself, suggests a bleeding between these categories. (Although during my encounter in the post-show discussion the topic of race was generally touched on in conversation, many comments suggested discomfort and avoidance of discussing the evocation of enslavement outright.) Ray similarly noted how “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.’)”(35) Utilizing the history of enslavement both as a foundation for exploratory kink and for the humor of satire further adds to the cognitive load—after all, these sexual exploits seem to indicate that the power dynamics of enslavement can be laughed at as “just a joke” in this context. Leaning on Horatian satire not only leaves Kaneisha in an ambiguous place between flesh and body, but also between assault and “a joke.”

This troubling of bodies, flesh, enslavement, and kink contributes heavily to the hyperinivisibility of Kaneisha due to the intersections of identities she inhabits. Kaneisha-as-body becomes hypervisible as a subject for her white partner, Jim, but Kaneisha-as-flesh remains invisible and he cannot bring himself to sexually satisfy her. In discussing how Black femininity has been understood as an excess of flesh, Nicole R. Fleetwood argues that it becomes “a performative that doubles visibility: to see the codes of visuality operating on the (hyper)visible body that is its object. Excess flesh does not destabilize the dominant gaze or its system of visibility. Instead, it refracts the gaze back upon itself.”(36) Kaneisha’s engagement in S/M, particularly a historical scenario rooted in an unequal racial power balance, becomes an attempt to render both her Blackness and her sexuality-as-flesh visible.

Black women face the most significant consequences based on this dynamic between flesh and/or body due to occupying a constellation of racialized and gendered categories. During the  era of enslavement in the US, from approximately 1619 through the nineteenth century, Black women were categorized and recognized as flesh to support their position within the economic system, but not flesh capable of experiencing “fleshly” desires. Black women continued to hold this space of ambiguity—flesh unable to experience fleshly desire, only bodies in terms of labor production—in the same way that Spillers describes the captive personality as “unmade.” Saidiya V. Hartman similarly indicates that the conditions of slave agency express an oxymoron given that enslaved social existence is defined by lack of agency, asking, “What are the constituents of agency when one’s social condition is defined by negation and personhood refigured in the fetishized and fungible terms of object of property?”(37) Kaneisha’s initial appeals to Jim in act one illustrate desire of the flesh, particularly as she encourages him to dominate her in ways he finds degrading. By viewing Kaneisha as separate from her flesh (which includes her sexuality and her Blackness), Jim makes her both an object of desire and an invisible entity that fails to register as significant—he participates in her hyperinvisiblity.

To bring this back to my earlier analysis on comedy, I return to my inquiry to understand when Slave Play ceases to be a comedy to further illustrate the risk of this hyperinvisibility regarding Kaneisha. Not only does she exist at a site of ambiguity between flesh and body, but between humor and critique as well. In his discussion of physical humor, John Wright identifies that staging scenes based in typicality is much more useful to humor, where “the vast majority of our comedy is based on recognition. We laugh because we can see ourselves in that situation. We laugh because we understand and we can share that understanding.”(38) Indeed, the first act allows for this recognition and understanding at the intersection of sex, desire, embarrassment, and the ridiculous . Moving into the third act, however, and an increasingly charged interaction between Kaneisha and Jim, the laughter remains. It would be impossible to conclude what exactly laughter from the audience might signify in that moment as it would require extensive generalization across multiple audiences in multiple cities and years. Still, Wright’s description of laughter as recognition is insightful—how is this situation of dominance recognized? And, to echo the comment from the talkback at the opening of this essay, does this recognition perpetuate what have (predominantly white) American audiences come to expect for Black women?

Drawing on LaMarre’s conclusions, the cognitive load of balancing satirist’s intentions versus interpretations, Slave Play focuses predominantly on understanding what should be read as humor, leaving less cognitive capacity to properly analyze Kaneisha’s hyperinvisible status. Further, by utilizing sexuality as a means to explore this intersection of race, gender, and hyperinvisibility under the guise of satire, this cognitive load becomes even more challenging to fully process. In their analysis of Slave Play’s exploration of these sexual encounters, Kari Barclay argues that this play functions as an erotic return, a performance that “restore[s] an imagined time and place of historical trauma and reconceptualize[s] it as a site of potential pleasure.”(39) While the inclusion of kink and sexual roleplay does suggest potential pleasure, as Barclay notes, the ambiguity of satire goes further to frame this pleasure as also humorous and verging on comedic. Regarding the violence of the final scene, Barclay goes on to note that “the play’s reenactment of sexual violence, even under consensual circumstances, may not have been paired with the context needed to shepherd audiences through an encounter with difficult history. […] …audiences may not have always had such a supportive environment in the theatre.”(40) I agree with Barclay’s observation on the challenges of “shepherding” the audience through these moments, and I extend this concern for Slave Play’s audiences to address how the context of satire resists the supportive environment to engage with this difficult history while effectively reaffirming Kaneisha’s hyperinvisible status.

“There sure are a lot of white people here.”

The heavy cognitive load that results from layering satire, critique, and humor produces multiple instances where any given audience (or, in LaMarre’s terms, message receivers) potentially focuses excess energy on understanding the intent of the message rather than analyzing the argument itself. Given the overt nature of the play’s sexually explicit content, I suggest that this can produce situations where Slave Play unintentionally reproduces white supremacy. In her work on the subject, Dani Snyder-Young observes that white theatre audiences often desire to present themselves as “good white people,” which significantly impacts their conclusions about whatever performances they are viewing. She described that these white audiences “misrecognized realistically drawn white characters who perform their whiteness in ungraceful, hurtful ways as bad, racist white people, and find ways to distance themselves from these characters,” without reading these characters as representative of a generalized class of white people.(41) By denouncing racist white characters, “good white people” can distance themselves from racism without personal interrogation. In this context, the recognition of comedy within the satire allows for audience members to potentially categorize themselves as “good white people” based on the recognition of humor.

Not only does the category of “good white people” resist intervention to break down white supremacy, but the movement between Horatian satire, Juvenalian satire, and realism challenges how “good white people” should interpret the action of Slave Play. Returning to his analysis of the play as a triptych, Firmino pointed out that the third act feels “the most real,” functioning predominantly as a reflection of reality rather than a satirical interpretation. Still, there is little information provided to help contextualize this transition. Indeed, the third act functions as the only time when the “Starbucks” safe word is evoked, but it lacks the immediate breakage as seen in the first act. In its first use, used by Kaneisha’s partner Jim, “Starbucks” severs the audience from the antebellum setting, creating an anachronistic dissonance that immediately hints these encounters are not what we initially believed them to be. As the play moves toward a sensation of “the most real,” the use of “Starbucks” relates to the more grounded portrayal of BDSM safe words—a term or signal that ends the sexual encounter immediately to protect those involved, particularly with rough or violent scenarios. The ambiguity of how Kaneisha uses the term at the end of the play and whether the encounter actually stops has been a point of discussion in many reviews and reactions attempting to determine if the play’s final moment should be categorized as assault or merely a specific type of sexual encounter. Actress Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, who both originated the role at Yale and performed as Kaneisha on Broadway and the West Coast, emphasized in one interview that “at the point [Kaneisha] says, ‘No,’ it stops. How it gets there is up to the interpretation of the audience.”(42) In her review, Ray reflected that on both occasions she saw the performance she thought she heard the actor playing Kaneisha say “stop,” and that she “realized [Kaneisha] uses the safeword when I read the script later.”(43) Positioning an indeterminate sexual encounter alongside extensive satire challenges precisely how the category of “good white people” gets defined, particularly when it comes to humor.

I recognized this desire to align with “good white people” during my own attendance at Slave Play in 2022. I went into the experience with significant background knowledge of the play and the playwright, and upon arrival at the Taper Forum in Los Angeles felt an overwhelming wave of anxiety about how my white, female body might be interpreted in relation to the play. Unlike other aspects of my background (my theatre research, my experience as a dramaturg, etc.), the visual reading of my race and gender became more deeply felt throughout the performance. A line from Ashley Ray’s review kept swimming through my head, an observation that “there sure are a lot of white people here.”(44) I became self-conscious of my reactions (or lack thereof), and I noticed my row included a small pocket of silence while the rest of the auditorium filled with loud laughter and guffaws at the first act. This internal tension and anxiety only intensified as the play went on and I found myself repeatedly wondering how I was supposed to be implicated in relation to the characters. The weight of the cognitive load gets distracting—I could not find the humor because I was so tangled up trying to understand what I was supposed to be laughing at, or whether that laughter was permitted. My experience highlighted this site of tension between satire and critique, while recognizing that my reaction was heavily informed by my particular intersection of identities. My preoccupation with understanding how to read the humor onstage became my primary focus in an attempt to track when the story shifted from “a comedy of sorts” toward the “most real,” a process which highlighted the extent of this cognitive load. It came to a head in the final moments of act three, excerpted at the beginning of this essay—in watching Kaneisha yell “Starbucks” over and over, I questioned what exactly I had been witnessing. Contextualizing this relationship—whether as kink, satire, or assault—felt deeply necessary in understanding Kaneisha as a character, and by extension, the play’s perspectives on Black women’s hyperinvisibility.

In order to consider the consequences of positioning Kaneisha as hyperinvisible, I return to the gap between satire and cognitive load. Despite the fact that Kaneisha becomes a hyperinvisible figure throughout the narrative of Slave Play, the final encounter casts the audience as witness to a highly visceral moment of violence. The emotional experience of this witnessing, even alongside the potential comedic reading of satire, can evoke what Judith Herman describes with the dialectic of trauma. “It is difficult for an observer to remain clearheaded and calm, to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time, to retain all the pieces, and fit them together,” Herman stated. “It is even more difficult to find a language that conveys fully and precisely what one has seen. Those who attempt to describe the atrocities that they have witnessed also risk their own credibility. To speak publicly about one’s knowledge of atrocities is to invite the stigma that attaches to victims.”(45) Further, it is the victim who requires more from the witness. Herman continues that “the victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”(46) Herman’s indication that the bystander share in the burden of pain returns to Sara Ahmed’s description of the ethics of pain. The action, engagement, and remembering demanded of the witness implicitly requires that they “act about that which [they] cannot know” as Ahmed prompts, and to be “moved by what does not belong to [them.]”(47) The assault that audiences witness at the end of Slave Play may similarly move them, but Kaneisha’s hyperinvisibility further challenges the role of the witness. As Herman describes, the role of the witness comes with its own difficulties in articulating, processing, and engaging empathy—when aligned with satire, these burdens are colored by potential humor and discounting, further reinscribing Kaneisha as hyperinvisible. 

In acknowledging the relationship between pain and history, Ahmed indicates that the two come together through the body. She observes that “harm has a history,” and that “pain is not simply an effect of a history of harm; it is the bodily life of that history.”(48) The potential for pain that exists at the core of Slave Play could potentially offer an exploration of America’s relationship to enslavement. This approach, however, would require an acknowledgement of the specifics of this pain, rather than the ambiguity that takes place. Empathy cannot always access pain (as Ahmed argues), and the call of this pain “is a call not just for an attentive hearing, but for a different kind of inhabitance,” that results in a politics “based not on the possibility of what we might be reconciled, but on learning to live with the impossibility of reconciliation, or learning that we live with and beside each other, and yet we are not as one.”(49) The call of pain demonstrated in Slave Play, particularly in relation to Kaneisha, seems to hinge on keeping her in a state of hyperinvisibility. Slave Play asks audiences and characters to witness Kaneisha throughout her arc to sympathize with her situation, however doing so alongside the context of satirical humor still underscores the hyperinvisibility of Black female bodies.

What moment made you want to say “Starbucks”?

At the end of the post-show conversation, the two facilitators gave one final audience member a chance to discuss what resonated or what they would take away from this production. The young woman selected to speak sat on the opposite side of the auditorium from me, and framed her reflection as more of a question than a statement. She mentioned that she was Asian-American, and noted the importance of identifying herself that way as the play highlighted a similar gap between how we self-identify and how the world interprets or reads us. Her question centered around this gap—wondering when self-identification was no longer empowering because it relied on overt explanation rather than how one is perceived.(50)

I found myself pondering this thought in relation to Kaneisha—in many ways, it didn’t matter how she self-identified because the world of the play and by extension, the audience, interpreted her based on her hyperinvisibility. Similarly, viewing what happens to Kaneisha as “expected,” as described by an earlier audience member, suggests that this hyperinvisibility had become ubiquitous with Black womanhood. The safe word “Starbucks” can remove the characters from the role play, and the audience can leave the theatre, but Kaneisha can’t seem to escape her hyperinvisibility. If this is still a comedy, perhaps it’s time to stop laughing.