20 THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019
ILLUSTRATION BY MAX DALTON
The thirty-year-old playwright Jeremy
O. Harris cannonballed into the down-
town theatre scene last season, with his
provocative, cheeky, and unsettling
“Slave Play,” which premièred at New
York Theatre Workshop while he was
still in his third year at the Yale School
of Drama. The play opens on a black
woman and a white man in antebellum
dress, enacting what appears to be an
oddly kinky example of master-slave
relations. (For one thing, she twerks to
Rihanna.) Then Harris turns the ta-
bles on the audience—again, and again.
The show sold out its first run, even as
a campaign against it raged on Twitter.
Now, remarkably, “Slave Play” is moving
to Broadway’s Golden Theatre (begin-
ning previews on Sept. 10), directed by
Robert O’Hara.
That play is sure to be the prickliest
pear in a season filled with amusements,
oddities, and reckonings with America’s
past and present. Matthew Lopez’s “The
Inheritance” (starting Sept. 27, at the
Barrymore), directed by Stephen Daldry,
has drawn comparisons to “Angels in
America” for its sweeping view of con-
temporary gay life; the two-part epic
played the West End last year. Robert
Schenkkan, who won a Tony Award for
“All the Way,” in 2014, continues his
theatrical account of Lyndon B. John-
son’s Presidency in “The Great Soci-
ety” (Sept. 6, Vivian Beaumont), with
Brian Cox taking over L.B.J. duties from
Bryan Cranston.
Jukebox musicals are a much ma-
ligned genre, but every so often they can
delight and surprise. “Tina: The Tina
Turner Musical” (Oct. 12, Lunt-Fon-
tanne) has the benefit of its subject’s
stirring songbook and eventful life, plus
direction by Phyllida Lloyd (“Mamma
Mia!”) and a book by Katori Hall (“The
Mountaintop”). “Jagged Little Pill”
(Nov. 3, Broadhurst) uses the Alanis
Morissette album, plus new songs, to
tell the story of a suburban family grap-
pling with very contemporary issues,
including queer identity and opiate ad-
diction; Diablo Cody wrote the script,
and Diane Paulus directs.
Marisa Tomei plays a feisty Italian-American widow in the Roundabout
Theatre Company’s revival of Tennessee
Williams’s “The Rose Tattoo,” directed
by Trip Cullman (Sept. 19, American
Airlines). David Byrne makes a case
for optimism in the theatrical concert
“American Utopia” (Oct. 4, Hudson).
And the hip-hop improv troupe Free-
style Love Supreme, whose rotating
members include Lin-Manuel Miranda,
Daveed Diggs, and James Monroe Ig-
lehart, brings its impromptu rhymes
uptown (Sept. 13, Booth).
Off Broadway, Peter Dinklage, who
whispered to kings and queens on
“Game of Thrones,” tries wooing from
the wings in the New Group’s “Cyrano”
(Oct. 11, Daryl Roth Theatre). Jonathan
Groff plays a lovestruck nerd who makes
a Faustian bargain with a flesh-eating
Venus flytrap in “Little Shop of Hor-
rors” (Sept. 17, Westside). And the
Public Theatre brings back two pivotal
works: Tony Kushner’s political drama
“A Bright Room Called Day” (Oct. 29),
which played there in 1990, and Ntozake
Shange’s choreopoem “For Colored
Girls Who Have Considered Suicide /
When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” which
premièred at the Public in 1976.
—Michael SchulmanFALL PREVIEW
History Revamped, Music Legends, Cyrano