When Slave Play opened at New York Theatre Workshop in fall 2018, Jeremy O. Harris’ play generated the kind of buzz few playwrights can claim in a lifetime, let alone at the start of a professional career. Harris’ first play to be produced (while he was still a grad student) was extended and sold-out, attracting a slew of celebrities. Now, Slave Play—a provocative study of sex, race, psychology, and history—moves to the John Golden Theatre, marking the Broadway debuts of both its playwright and its director, Obie winner Robert O'Hara.

“I was drawn to the audacity of the voice, the non-linear quality, and that it was close to the type of work that I like to do,” says O’Hara, himself an acclaimed playwright of such plays as Barbecue and Bootycandy. “Slave Play usurps the audience’s opinions. It allows them to get comfortable before choking them, a little bit. The audience is left with many more questions than when they began.”

For Harris, working on Slave Play has been the opportunity to work with an artist he’s long admired. Before O’Hara was Harris’ professor at Yale, the two met via email when Harris reached out to O’Hara, requesting a copy of one of his plays. “The work that’s being presented is so married to the work that my director has also been working on [that] makes it feel like I’m walking very much in step with someone else,” says Harris. “That we’re dancing in time together.”

LOOK BACK: Meet Playwright Jeremy O. Harris, Making His Mark With 2 World Premieres Off-Broadway