“Slave Play,” it turns out, is the blunter way of phrasing what Teá and Patricia are up to. They call it Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy. They birthed it at Smith and raised it up at Yale, and it’s a radical role-play-based therapy intended to “help black partners reengage intimately with white partners from whom they no longer receive sexual pleasure.” It’s about “tackling your anhedonia at its source,” Teá assures Kaneisha, Phillip, and Gary, as all three couples reemerge onto the stage in the play’s second act, with the nervy closed faces of actors girding their loins for a particularly frustrating talk-back. The brilliant twist of Slave Play is that for all the graphic intimacy of the show’s first act, its performers are infinitely more exposed in the acts to come, when the real people that they’re playing must struggle to come to grips with the fantasies they’ve just enacted. The casual put-on racism, seemingly bizarre desires, and flights of violence that occurred during the couples’ role-play might have hurt, but attempting to look each other in the eyes after the performance — attempting to speak to each other and, more important and more difficult, to listen — is going to hurt much, much more.
What?
What?
