With 'Slave Play,' A Young Playwright Provokes His Way To Broadway
Jeremy O. Harris, 30, started writing a sexually explicit, transgressive and comic work as a graduate student at Yale. It proved a surprising smash hit, and will soon open on a much bigger stage.
by Ari Shapiro
Sep 20, 2019
4 minutes
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Even in Times Square — crammed with tourists from around the world dodging people in superhero costumes — the playwright Jeremy O. Harris stands out.
He's walking down the sidewalk with two thick and long braids, standing six feet and five inches tall, wearing a see-through shirt, carrying bags from fashion designers and smoking a cigarette. He's between New York Fashion Week events and his Broadway opening.
He approaches the Golden Theatre on 45th Street, where the marquee reads "the single most daring thing I've seen in the theater in a long time" — a quotation from Wesley Morris of The New York Times -- and has his name on it, in big, all-caps letters.
"Yes, it's
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