Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play.

Watched it and was taken aback by the self obsessed rubbish that someone with zero direct experience of slavery, dealing with others or even living with other humans in a semi cooperative manner has the nerve to make.

Folks like this do a terrible amount of damage to any message that they pretend to be a part of. Disturbed egomania at play here...within a play, on screen.

The idiots who gave the green light to this trash need blacklisting aka like the anti communist stuff in the 1950's.

The adage that ' if you have friends like this...you really have no need for enemies,' holds very true here, a nightmare production.

Due to my location I haven't yet had the opportunity to see "Slave Play" but this "documentary" by Harris seemed more like an obvious vanity piece rather than any kind of an exploration of the play or its process. Most of the film is devoted to watching Harris talk ad nauseum about himself to a group of actors; I found his hyperactive, stream-of-consciousness, all-over-the-place manner become increasingly grating as the film progressed. In one particular scene the actors are shown sitting with their backs to him and they look as though they've become as weary and annoyed with hearing him talk about himself as I had.

What was the purpose of making this film? After it was over, I found myself losing interest in wanting to see the actual play.

I'm not sure what the purpose of the "documentary" is. It's just a group of young actors (who are all quite good) work shopping the play scene by scene, but this was done after the Broadway production. I supposed this might be of interest to acting students but it really tells us nothing about the controversies of the original staging. I saw a couple positive reviews that read like we probably saw 2 completely different films.

What is DOES seem to be is a huge ego-stroker for the writer/director. What a huge disappointment as I was going to see the show in a few weeks in London but now...meh.

Jeremy seems to perceive himself as having a uniquely profound and superior perspective on life and human existence but in a way that is reminiscent of a teenager who has smoked pot for the first time and whose mind was suddenly blown by the realization the the universe has no known end. The movie opens with a woman in the audience who was upset by the play, clearly distressed, and yelling at him about how he doesn't understand the challenges that she has been through in her life and felt blamed for being white. He responds to her by saying that the play is not about her but "just about these eight people up here." He then goes on to say that it is "a metaphor" but "just about these eight people," seemingly to be momentarily forgetting the meaning of metaphor. After the woman storms out, he mocks her to the entire audience.

He offers insights into the depth of his thinking with soliloquies along the lines of, "Theater is, like, my life, you know. Like I breath it and live it, and like it is everything for me, and, you know, like, theater is, like...you know?" He talks about how he reads all sorts of random things online and has "like a million tabs open all the time," implying, somehow, that this is evidence of his profundity. He speaks with an air of thick pretentiousness, like a first year college student gracing their audience with their nascent socio-political awareness. He is able to defend his incohesive and mostly incoherent thoughts and arguments by presuming that anyone that disagrees with him just doesn't understand the world at his level or feels threatened by his work, the laziest of all rhetorical defenses. His entire presence seems to be rooted in his deep fantastical longing for fame and praise and recognition, thinly veiled in some sort of social-justicey charade, all of which ultimately does a deep disservice to any real efforts to fight injustice in the world.

What a disappointment. Not having seen this play but knowing some of its history, I was truly looking forward to seeing this. But the playwright doesn't seem particularly interested in sharing his work with us. Instead, we get his leading a group of actors through a series of readings filled with far too many jump cuts to form any impression of what's going on. When that doesn't work, he shows the rough cut on a laptop to another group of actors, tosses in clips of the Broadway or off-Broadway production and random shots of porn and old movies that apparently influenced his "play." I was left with the impression his play was controversial, but I knew that before I sat down to watch this.