Oh, Jeremy!
From Slave Play and “Daddy”, to Gucci and Zola, the Playwright Defining a New Category of Cultural Celebrity
- Interview: Doreen St. Félix
- Photography: Ruth Ossai
This article is the cover story for Issue 3 of the SSENSE biannual print publication.
The trench nearly swept the block as its occupant, Jeremy O. Harris, led me from dinner to a Williamsburg apartment building, almost two years ago. The structure was in the gentrification style, meaning it had no history and transmitted no warmth, until Harris breached its perimeter. Harris is like an element of weather, overwhelming the clime of the room with his own heat. In demeanor, he is excitable—a temperament that is out of step with the times—and his attitude and positive outlook toward living and creating, upon first or second encounter, can prevent you from noticing his powerful sensitivity. “Do you know Rosalía?,” he asks me, before playing “Malamente” from the speakers in the building sauna. Was he asking if I knew the music or the star?
With Slave Play and "Daddy", the 30-year-old Harris has become, and maybe defined, for this new century, a category of cultural celebrity: a very famous and sexy playwright. It is not a pejorative to reference Harris as a cultural celebrity. While the fashion seeks to make him its muse, and the people demand he answer for his provocations, he remains in utter control of his phenomenon. The artist is in deep touch with our civilizing mechanisms—racism, sexism, homophobia, pop culture—a candor that many, Black and white, cannot take. Output is not a worry; even onstage, the projects pulse, the writing, vexed and aspirational, is borne from an endless fertility.
The coat was Gucci, and it had two faces; one panel was business-black, the other a red tartan, with a graphic panel skirting its edges. In the apartment, more Gucci items were strewn—loans, as was the apartment. Harris, of course, experiencing a thing, instantly owns it. The world has gawked at his ability to clamp down at the ineffable. His subject is, broadly, psychological trauma, how we negotiate ours during sex, and so it is unnerving and relieving to see him having so much fun.
Harris is always attaching himself to a project. A play for the Bushwick Starr, under a pseudonym. Zola, a screenplay for the buzzy A24 film, co-written with its director Janicza Bravo. An HBO deal. The enterprise of being himself. The theater, to him, is the holy thing, but it is also an instrument through which he can enact his series of dares. Harris upends etiquette. Actually: he reminds the theater of the nature of its trampy, insurrectionist origins. If a pop star (Rihanna) is late to arrive to the Broadway performance of Slave Play, he will hold the curtain for her, because isn't she the reason the piece exists in the first place? He is brave enough to identify himself as an “aesthete.”
Since this last time we have seen each other, Harris has danced with models on a runway in France; he has begun an inter-generational friendship with his idol, Adrienne Kennedy. Messaging each other, one night, Harris and I agree that he was born too late. Among his idols, [Sam] Shepard and [Shelagh] Delany and Kennedy, or maybe deep in the throng of the "Niggerati," he would have been better understood.
A story that demonstrates first the unflappability and then the tenderness of Harris: Last summer, while dealing with the move from Yale—where he received an MFA in playwriting—and the death of his grandfather, Harris neglected to attend to the matter of a storage unit, in which an original draft of Slave Play was stored. Harris came in contact with the owner, who knew that he had an influential person on the line. The owner made him pay.
Our conversation happened in early August. Harris had returned to a nocturnal lifestyle, better to accommodate the schedule of his partners, business and romantic; in other words, he turned London into Los Angeles. A kind of alchemy. Halfway through our interview, I inquire after the trench coat, which I see as an exemplar of his mode of glamorous self-defense. He asks if I would like to see his closet. Like he does, he put on a little show. We talked of his childhood, his fears, and his routines. On display was the raw wires of his personality. The O, by the way, is for O’Bryant.
Doreen St. Félix
Jeremy O. Harris
You were in London when the pandemic hit in March, preparing for a run of "Daddy", and you haven’t left since. How are you coping?
I feel really comforted by how chaotic this moment is, because I can just be in Europe right now and be like, “You know what, let's go to Austria,” because it's right there, it's 70 euros to fly over. My boyfriend's like, "But what would happen to all of this other stuff and work stuff?” I'm like, “Work doesn't exist in the same way anymore; it’s a hustle that we have to do, but we can have these pockets of joy inside of the hustle.” I know that because I grew up actually poor and inside of a really chaotic poverty, you know what I mean, where the work is always going to be there.
Are you in love?
I don't know. I definitely do feel differently about this partnership than I have with anyone else. I've generally really liked dating people who didn't care for me. They might've cared about me, but they didn't care for me. He goes upstairs and I go upstairs and there's already another glass of water next to the bed waiting for me, and that's caring for me in a way that no one else really has, really thinking about my needs, not just as they relate to his needs, but just like, “How can I make sure that this person's going to sustain for a week of living in this apartment?”
We’ve known each other for a couple of years now, and what I’ve found fascinating and sometimes unnerving about you is your honesty with yourself. And yet, we tell ourselves lies to live. What lies do you tell yourself to keep going?
At the beginning of COVID, I had genuinely convinced myself again that I didn’t know how to write. That everything I did was an accident, and that it was all because of the way I learned how to talk like a Valley Girl in high school that had gotten me this far. Then I had to go back and reread everything I’ve written over the past four years to be like, “Jeremy, here are the ways you’ve grown as a writer. Actually, you are a technically good writer.”
Do you ever wonder if you hadn’t experienced such intense popularity, following the success of Slave Play and "Daddy", you’d have the quiet needed to experiment as a writer?
I think that if I hadn't reached that level of popularity I would definitely feel better as a writer in a lot of ways, more confident as a writer, because I think that there's nothing that's more fun than saying that your favorite mixtape rapper got shitty when they went on a major label.
Having the creature comforts of success makes it really annoying. The fact that I could DM certain celebrities that I love and be like, “Will you read my play and tell me what you think of it?”
You’re constitutionally a hustler.
I do sometimes wish that I could have had a more graceful entrance into the world, but I also don't know that I would've gotten the things out of my twenties that I wanted. One of the first plays that I was going to get produced, ["Daddy"], a white producer wanted a celebrity for every role. I said, "Well, why can't I be the celebrity?" He laughed in my face.
To make sure Slave Play was seen, you did what everyone in the industry does, but you didn’t do it behind doors. You made the promotional apparatus available for all to see.
The marketing conversation for Slave Play at New York Theater Workshop was so fucking fun.
I was like, “I don't like theater copy. It's bad.” I was like, “I want this to feel like the 1970s, like blaxploitation movies: ‘This summer, the number one movie you need to see is Slave Play. It's hot, it's sweaty, it's plantation.’” And, they were like, “That's crazy.”
For me, theater is the lamest of all of the major art forms that someone can be a part of. I recognize that there's actually a real power in [that]. I'm in one of the truly dying industries. I nakedly want people to come see theater and care about theater and talk about theater, you know, and be like, a theater supremacist.
How did you feel when the production of "Daddy" got shut down?
"Daddy" in London was like another level than "Daddy" in New York, and not because of the cast, but just because of having five weeks of rehearsal, which is something you don't get in New York. We were all having so much fun that we were like, “Things might be going left in Milan, but there's no way they'll reach us here in London.” Our artistic director was like, “What are you talking about? This is London. We never shut down the theater. We didn't shut down the theater during the plague.”
I had a lot of excitement about sharing my work in London. [In New York], everyone was still so hyped about Slave Play and I was on a high from it that I didn't protect "Daddy" the way I protected Slave Play. I didn't share the story of "Daddy" with the same panache that I shared the story of Slave Play.
"Daddy" is the origin story. You wrote it before Slave Play.
It feels really triumphant for people, whereas people aren't realizing that it's actually a weird play where I was dreaming on a page a way to write myself out of poverty, and how that might be complicated for me. You’re seeing a story about a young Black boy with a single mother from the South who is deciding to marry, essentially, an older white man inside of this all-white building on a hill in Beverly Hills, and in order to have stability in order to make his art. Going to Yale was me deciding to marry a white guy on a hill and in order to have the time and space to make my work, right? I'm my own daddy now, you know?
Part of the reason that Franklin's [in the play] playing with dolls is that I was thinking about voodoo and the ways that Black manifestations often use objects and dolls and music to create new realities for ourselves. I'm like, “Did I cast a spell in a play? What did I do?”
You engage. It’s your default. How does it feel engaging with the Black women, both those who have seen, read, and not experienced Slave Play, who feel that you are exploiting their trauma?
I think that at first I did that really defensive thing where I felt like I had to over-explain everything I was doing all the time while also having this impulse of wanting to protect my play. I don't want to have to explain to someone the ending of a play that is ambiguous. Because the minute I explain the ambiguity it stops being ambiguous, and therefore no one wants to teach it anymore or write about it anymore.
There's nothing else I can do except engage with my actions, and really try to uplift the Black women around me and keep doing the work that I'm doing.
True.
If someone writes a play that I don't like, or a movie I don't like, or writes a book I don't like, I'd rather engage them on a real level and just be like, “What were you doing?” Because at the end of the day we're all doing math equations on ideas, and these intangible things we're trying to make sense of inside of our art forms. And there's no way that any one of us is going to get it right every time. I hope that someone who hates Slave Play will come out and write a play about it.
Like Ishmael Reed and Hamilton.
I want there to be more diss tapes in the theater.
I met your mother at an after-party for Slave Play. She’s beautiful. How do you think she’d describe you as a child?
I’ll ask her right now?
Harris calls his mother, who is braiding the hair of his niece, Kyra. His nephew is playing in the background.
Hey, mommy. Doreen wanted to ask you a question for the interview.
What was Jeremy like as a child?
Jeremy’s Mom: Jeremy was an old soul. He was very mature and very wise, too, at a very young age. Well-mannered, he was very protective of me. Very protective...He told me when he was, I think, five years old, he told me, “Mommy, I would never let anybody else hurt you ever again.” He was funny. He was very protective. But he was a very smart, brilliant kid. I knew he had something special about him at a young age, but I just didn't know what.
JH: Mama, what was the name of that first salon, the one you worked at after you graduated from Dudley’s?
JM: Ladies and Gents.
JH: My first job was at Ladies and Gents…Kathy got mad at me because I was really bad at cleaning up the towels at the salon, and so y'all schemed up when I was 14 and got me a job at Burger King from someone who was a manager who would come to the salon.
JM: Jeremy hated it.
I know you were smelling like fries all day.
I always tell Kyra, “Uncle Jeremy will never let you work at Burger King. You will never work at Burger King like Uncle Jeremy.”
Kyra makes a request of Uncle Jeremy: that he buy her a book, called Middle of Nowhere. He acquiesces, almost breathlessly. We hang up.
That was very sweet. I didn’t know she was going to talk about all that.
What were the fictions that you experienced, read, saw, as a kid that unmoored you, where you were like, “Whatever that artist has going on in their brain, I want that in my brain?”
I remember I got in trouble because in the sixth grade I went to the restricted section and I read The Color Purple, which was a red label book. [The letters] really unmoored me because I was like, “Wait, you can show someone learning how to be articulate over the course of a narrative?” That really blew my mind.
I remember the crux of my writing about this book is that her sexuality was linked to sexual assault.
Years of being like, raped by her father, led her to be a lesbian, which I found really interesting. That was my way, as a child, of processing queerness. “Okay, maybe what the pastors say is right. Maybe the reason someone becomes queer is because of X, Y, or Z.” But I remember also being really excited that someone could find a space of power for themselves by rejecting the natural world and being like, “It might be more natural to be with a man, but men have treated me wrong, so I will be with a woman.” In my mind, I was like, “Yes, if I did end up being with a man later, it's not because I'm gay and born wrong. It's because the world of heterosexuality is just inherently violent and wrong and maybe I don't even want to be a part of that game.” I remember I did this whole book report on that. My teacher was like, “No, no, no, no, no.”
In sixth grade?
And then I got into sci-fi, Ender’s Game, Philip Pullman. Huge Harry Potter fan. I discovered Beloved and I loved Beloved. After I read The Sound and the Fury, no one could tell me anything. Another big thing, I googled my birthday and found out that I was born the same day as Marquis de Sade in the ninth grade. And then I looked all over in every Barnes & Noble for a copy of one of his books, and at one Barnes & Noble in Greensboro, North Carolina, they had Philosophy in the Boudoir.
Who were your style icons?
I didn't have the access or the money for anything, and also my style had to be respected by my mom. She wanted to go to Nautica. I wanted to look like Louis Garrel in The Dreamers. But that was something, my mom would never buy me a lace robe to walk down the stairs in. Like a green, silk random robe, or high-waisted black pants that were too tight in the front.
Harris gives St. Félix a tour of his London apartment, and pauses on a closet, lined with his beloved coats.
Do you feel like you’re a lucky person?
I do. There are people who are fiercely on the offense when I say I'm lucky, like, “You're not lucky. You earned everything you got.” I know for a fact that I am a little lucky because certain shit doesn't make any sense unless there are... That was one of the things that made me laugh about people being like, “The ancestors are going to get him.” I'm like, “The ancestors don't seem that mad at me.”
I'm lucky and I'm tenacious. Growing up the way I grew up, meaning with a mother who was still young enough to have to use charm to get the things she needed because people underestimated everything else, being able to witness that and learn from that means that situations like the Broadway thing show up for me in a way that they might not show up for another playwright.
Of course, when we talk about charm and charisma, these things are racialized. The idea that someone tap-danced into their success. Tell me about the earlier years. You pop up everywhere, in episodes of High Maintenance, What We Do In The Shadows.
That period is something that I barely understand. I was sleep deprived and on so many different types of drugs and drunk so often that I can't ever say for sure, “Oh yeah, in 2014, we were definitely there.” I keep joking that I want to write a memoir, but the memoir would be situated around Facebook statuses and Instagram posts, because that's how I'm able to track what I was doing. I have documented everything, which is why I really hate the culture of deleting things, or feeling like I have to delete things, because something I said in the Obama age hasn't made sense.
My very first job in L.A., I worked at the Barney’s Co-op in the Third Street Promenade. I moved around. I worked for an art gallery and the art gallery ended up being a scam run by a guy named Jacob, who ended up going to jail for robbing someone and leaving his brother dead in his house. I should've known that most bosses don't give the people that work for them molly daily, and go out to nightclubs with them. But I was just like, “This is L.A. It's so L.A.”
Anything can be “so L.A.” when you have no reference.
My friend came to L.A. to visit me. Mitchel looked at me and was like, “Are you living in a Bret Easton Ellis novel?”
One thing I really like about you is that beneath the candor, I find you inscrutable at times.
Because I’m always performing?
Yes. In the interview dynamic, I can see you wanting to frame the answer a certain way, for me.
For the world.
And for the ongoing project of being Jeremy O. Harris, I find that fascinating.
I do interviews more like a comedian.
You like tangents, but you’re described as prolific.
The thing that makes me productive is having people be like, “Where is it, Jeremy?” What they should say is like, “Jeremy is very comfortable having second drafts in the world.”
Failure, which can be a wonderful thing for artists, has different consequences for you now. You’ve got the HBO deal, and the discretionary fund for theater artists you negotiated.
I'm excited to see if I can bet right on the kind of work that I think the world needs to be seeing and supporting. I want to be able to give maybe someone who doesn't have the same kind of contacts I have, like access to a PR team, to tell the world about their show. And I wanted to give everyone something I had to fight really hard for, which was being a producer of my own play.
How can we as individuals start Robin Hooding from these places while we can? I like the fact that there's more ways to fuck up these systems, because socialism is not going to happen tomorrow. But, if more people like me, or Michaela [Coel], or other people are able to fuck things up in the little ways we can, we might be able to redistribute some of the wealth from these corporations in new ways.
What’s the technique you’re working to perfect right now?
The thing that's hard for me is figuring out how to surprise myself with a play again. I’m really excited about inventing a new thing, in the way that [August] Strindberg inserted a cracked naturalism into the world and was like, “Bam, bitches! Y’all ain't never seen anything like this.”
Doreen St. Félix has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2017, where she is currently the magazine's television critic. In 2017, she was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, and, in 2019, she won in the same category.
- Interview: Doreen St. Félix
- Photography: Ruth Ossai
- Hair: Isaac Poleon / D and V Management
- Makeup: Rebecca Davenport
- Photography Assistant: Ryan Coleman Connolly, Luke Ossai
- Production: Ermaine Ampomah
- Styling: Jeremy's Own
- Date: October 1st, 2020
