After Slave Play premiered on Broadway in 2019, reputable Hollywood studios were quick to flood playwright Jeremy O. Harris’ email inbox. They sent requests to purchase the film rights, hoping to turn his provocative work about interracial couples working through issues in an “antebellum sexual performance therapy” workshop into a narrative feature. Harris, from the start, was against the idea. “I wrote back, ‘Slave Play is not a movie. It’s a play. But thank you,’” he recalls to ELLE.com one recent Wednesday. “That’s an email I had to send a bunch. I felt quite intense about it.”

Ironically, however, it was this very scenario that would later inspire the title of Harris’ directorial debut: an experimental documentary he’s dubbed Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play. Following the writer in 2022 as he “workshops” his hit play with close to two-dozen new actors, the film is as much an in-depth examination of the production itself as it is an intimate exploration of Harris’ distinct worldview and omnivorous creative process. “Structurally, I turn the film into a SparksNotes for the play,” the newly-minted director tells ELLE.com. But some of the documentary’s most interesting threads exist outside the confines of the Tony-nominated text, spilling over into discussions about what the play represents, how it was received, and where its razor-sharp observations probe deepest in a wider cultural context—like when a white actress gets visibly “uncomfortable” saying words like “mammy” and “pickaninny” despite them being crucial for her her character. (She’s eventually advised to sit in that discomfort, using it to inform the performance.)

The film, filled with moments like this, is a fascinating next step for the playwright, who in the last half-decade has become something of a celebrity everyman, parlaying his theater fame into a fruitful overall deal with HBO (who’s releasing the documentary); a slew of fashion collaborations; acting stints in hit shows like Emily in Paris and Cannes films like The Sweet East; and even a Film Independent Spirit Award nomination, thanks to his co-writing credits on Janicza Bravo’s wildly popular adaptation of the viral Zola Twitter thread. Just this past weekend it was announced he’ll produce Jennifer Lawrence’s Real Housewives-inspired murder mystery from A24.

Directing Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play. marks a significant pivot for Harris, but if his career up to this point is anything to go by, this won’t be the last time he tries his hand at something new.

I’m exhausted! I’m setting up my production company, building out a couple new projects, and working tirelessly on Invasive Species [a play which O’Harris is executive producing]. I’m also serving as the Yale Drama Series Prize president, so I’m reading all these plays. Juggling all that while also trying to have some semblance of a social life has been a lot. But we didn’t show up to not work. That’s the only way you can play hard. I really take Kim Kardashian’s note to women to heart: I need to get my ass up!

Early on in the documentary, you say, “I’m making this thing that’s, in part, about Slave Play, but also, in whole, about me.” So many artists establish a distinction between themselves and their work, but this quote made me wonder what you think about that separation. Does this play feel like an extension of you, in any way?

I think that the specificities of how my plays work—how comedy juts up against trauma, how history gets twisted and wrapped up in a moment like a meme and then explodes into, like, theory or psychology—are specific to how Jeremy O. Harris and his brain work.

So in looking at this play, or the process of how one wrote it, I think it would be disingenuous to think that you aren’t just looking at a picture of me. Even though these characters are not me, even though the story is not me, the way in which I got there, the process in which I took to get there, is very me.

Is there any significance in kickstarting your directing career with a documentary, as opposed to a narrative feature?

You know, I worked with Janicza Bravo [on Zola]. She is someone who thinks, breathes, and lives cinema. Witnessing how she talks about a film made me feel incredibly insecure of even venturing into that space. Or knowing Jonathan Glazer and seeing how he thinks of the way a camera should sit inside of a scene for an actor, I was like, Girl, are you a director?

So one of the gifts of [this documentary] is that I got to explore whether or not I was a director, or how I was a director, through something that was a little teflon. I got to use it as this tool to experiment, knowing that, no matter what I did, if I just needed to go back and show the play, I could do that too—and people would probably be happy with it! This got to be an opportunity to see if I wanted to step into a new medium—and the answer was that I absolutely did.

When the play first premiered, it was quite controversially received. Many people really loved it, but just as many seemed to hate it. Did you anticipate that response?

At Yale, I had a really formative experience of people not fucking with it, which told me that there would maybe be some world where people would be upset or that it would be quote-unquote “controversial.” But I just couldn’t care about that because I always knew that the play wasn’t meant to play in these places anyway. Yes, I wrote it while I was at the Yale School of Drama, but from year one, I kept telling people, “I want to start my own theater company. I don’t want to work in commercial theater. My path is going to be working in small independent theater and starting a production company that I travel around with.” I had large ambitions, but the ambition was to be [Thomas] Ostermeier, or like Ivo van Hove, who is making stuff in Europe and Asia and Africa—not necessarily working at New York Theater Workshop, for example.

But when I got the opportunity to go [to Broadway], I was like, “Well, this is more money than I would make doing the other thing.” It was like being an indie artist that just got picked up by a major label. So I was like, if it flops in the majors, cool, that was never the goal.

But part of the reason I didn’t want to write towards mainstream theater is that I’d have to listen to notes that make it more “palatable.” I’d have to listen to someone say, “Oh, your second act is 15 minutes too long.” But I was very lucky that everyone liked my weird little indie play, and so when it went to the majors, it didn’t have to change. I just had to be aware that way more eyes were going to witness it than I had planned. That was the big growing pain, was transitioning from not caring to feeling really anxious about how many eyes were on me to feeling like maybe I had done something wrong to realizing that part of the function of the internet—and part of the function of New Celebrity—is that there will be too many opinions for you to keep track of, and the ones that are easiest to keep track of are the negative ones. But the negative ones are always a minority to the positive.

I was a little frustrated and surprised by the amount of ire the Black Twittersphere threw at the play. But now? Whatever, I get it—shit’s weird!”

Were you surprised by who ended up being offended? You open this documentary with footage of that now infamous confrontation by a white woman heckler, who, like many white people, took offense to aspects of the play. But some of the loudest critiques of Slave Play came from Black people. Were those reactions more shocking for you?

At Yale, the people who were most supportive of the play were all my Black colleagues and fellow Black students, so I was a little frustrated and surprised by the amount of ire the Black Twittersphere threw at the play. But now? Whatever, I get it—shit’s weird! And nobody knew who the fuck I was. They still don’t. And I think that if you don’t know who a person is or what their intentions are, it’s hard to meet a work like that with generosity.

How would you describe your relationship with critics? In the documentary, there’s a moment where you discuss being very aware about the fact that the Black characters hardly ever talk to each other, despite some detractors highlighting that as an oversight. But you were also honest about the fact that, when you considered how many people couldn’t pick up on that intentionality, you wondered whether you could’ve added in more context to make that choice telegraph more clearly.

I’m constantly hoping that when someone is presenting a critique that it’s from a place of generosity and not from a place of one-upmanship, because I do think that there’s a lot of one-upmanship or punching down in criticism. Some critics forget that, yes, while an artist may make more money than them or be more known than them, in the critic-artist relationship, [critics do] have some amount of power over how [artists] continue to do the work they want to do. I think there can often be a level of callousness by people who want to feel like they’re writing with the same energy of [Pauline] Kael, but oftentimes, the pen is not as strong. Sometimes, it just feels needlessly cruel and ungenerous. But there are people that have said things that I’ve really taken to heart. Helen Shaw said something about Daddy, where I was like, “Oh, that’s really cool.”

Something I find fascinating about this documentary is that, through “opening up” the text, you, in a way, end up explaining the play as it exists in your eyes. Since you are the playwright, when you tell your actors “this is what’s happening in this scene,” it also tells the audience how they should be interpreting characters and their motivations. Knowing you as someone who typically likes to let audiences come to their own interpretations about your work, what did you think about this aspect of your project?

When there was a documentary to be made, it became quite clear that the [easiest] way in for many people would have been something where I had major critics sitting and talking about what the play was doing or had some famous people who had seen the play sit down and be like, “I remember when I saw Slave Play and I thought this, that, and the third.” Or there would be, like you said, a lot of moments of me explicitly talking through what things are doing.

But I didn’t want that. I wanted to show versus tell. I also wanted to leave space for future play collaborators to find their own way into it. So what I hope is that when people see the way I talk about the characters and their characterizations, they see it with the sense that this is a director talking—and a director lies to get what they want out of an actor. A director will just say some shit. He’ll say, “Alana has a Ph.D.” Alana does not have a Ph.D that I know of. But she did that day! So I hope that people recognize that I’m playing around with the shortcuts to the characters, with emotional truths and not any actual, canonical truths about the play I wrote.

On that note, who is your imagined audience for this documentary? Is it people who have seen the play, who’ve heard of it but haven’t had the chance to see it, who’ve read it and loved it, who’ve heard of it and always hated it on principle?

I think the answer to that is the Tokyo Toni meme where she says, “Well… Yes…”

One of the most telling parts of this documentary is your explanation about how the play didn’t come together as a fully-formed idea, but instead built over time based on conversations you had with a variety of people about things like race, sex, desire, and kink. It speaks to the play’s existence as an encapsulation of many ideas, rather than some definitive statement that you’re personally trying to make.

The bigger misconception that I hope this documentary elucidates is that writing a play called “Slave Play” was not some grand plan to trick white people into taking me to Broadway. I don’t think one writes a play like this, in the way that I wrote it, thinking that it’s a hit. It was a happy accident that came on the back of the play feeling, for a lot of people, like a refraction of something they had thought, like some secret they had whispered in a corner that they didn’t think anybody could hear. It didn’t even have to be a desire. It could’ve been some fucked-up joke!

Like, the amount of “slave play” memes that kids who have never interacted with Slave Play ever in their life were making on TikTok… That became a meme-able thing amongst interracial couples who were like 15, so I know they had never read about my little Broadway play. But that was a part of their functional imaginary. I think that part of the reason the play hit is that it poked at a part of our imaginary that we often keep to the side or hidden. Or that we only allow in our most crass childlike jokes, which is why teenagers on TikTok were making those jokes.

The bigger misconception that I hope this documentary elucidates is that writing a play called ‘Slave Play’ was not some grand plan to trick white people into taking me to Broadway.”

Slave Play is about to open on London’s West End. Not to imply that racism doesn’t exist in Europe, but I do believe that Slave Play is a distinctly “American” play; the type of racism it addresses is inextricably connected to our country’s personal history with slavery. How has it been trying to translate this for a British audience?

It’s been really cool to be in rehearsal rooms with Brits and recognize how much of their own history is untaught to them, in this pursuit of a full amnesia of colonial history. That’s been really illuminating. It’s not an accident that one of the characters in this play is British, but it does become a happy accident how that Brit moves differently with a British actor in the role.

Almost four years ago, Slave Play set a record, becoming the most Tony-nominated play in history at the time. Then, it infamously lost every single one. How do you feel about that whole situation now?

I put that moment in the documentary of me, thirty minutes after the Tonys were over, holding my niece’s hand, talking about the [losses], because I think it would’ve felt disingenuous not to show that I was really sad. It did really suck to not win. But looking back, it’s like, “Okay. It was probably going to be that.” Before the Tonys, I had told everyone that I was probably going to lose.

As a piece of theater, Slave Play will last forever. But does this documentary feel like a culmination of anything—of at least a certain phase of your history with the play?

Absolutely. When I first got signed to an agency seven years ago, they were like, “What do you want to be?” I was like, “I want to be an international playwright.” And they were like, “We don’t really do that. What theaters in America do you care about?” And I was like, “Literally none.”

So what’s really cool is that I’ve now worked with [London’s] The Almeida for Daddy, which also premiered in Tokyo. And now, Slave Play is getting its West End premiere and then hopefully a little tour with the original Broadway cast, some of whom have done it since the very first reading at Yale. It feels like this moment where we’ve gotten the band back together. So it feels like a goodbye—and this documentary is a part of that. But I do think we’ll be like Jay-Z and keep being like, “We’re retired,” and then show back up in a decade and be like, “We’re back! Doing it again!” But for now, I’m ready for people to read all the other plays that I’ve written.