Did anybody else read Jeremy O Harris's 25 Tweet thread?
What struck me were the passages in which he said he wanted his play to be "produced in a small, intimate space."
"Slave Play was written to be anti-institutional a little bomb I could place inside the one institution that had to produce it, Yale....Me being the one playwright in my year who didn’t want to have a career like an August Wilson, a Stephen Adly Guirguis, a John Guare set me apart. I wanted to be Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Adrienne Kennedy. On the fringe and writing punk rage plays that institutions don’t do....So imagine my surprise when a theatre, an institution wanted to do it...."
Here's what I'm grappling with: If he wanted it to be "a little bomb" in "a small, intimate space," why is he 1. surprised that it exploded and 2. why did he not only agree to have it produced in an "institution" but went along with all the many interviews and profiles and TV segments? For a playwright who's still a student making an Off-Broadway debut, he got a stunning amount of publicity. |
