[12] Meanwhile, Phillip keeps playing music that Alana does not like on his fiddle and Kaneisha and Jim are engaged in sex.

[12] It is revealed that in reality the characters are modern couples participating in a role-playing exercise meant to improve intimacy between white and black partners.

Jim is uncomfortable playing the role of the slave overseer and demeaning his wife, and believes the experience is traumatizing and ruining his relationship with Kaneisha.

Teá previously experienced anhedonia with Patricia, and it was through fantasy play that she worked out her racial trauma.

Kaneisha realizes that "virus" is the description she has been searching for, referencing the diseases introduced by Europeans which decimated the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Jim is silent as Kaneisha recounts how they met, and then times in her childhood when she had to visit plantations on school field trips.

[16] Jim begins to initiate foreplay and the music rises while Kaneisha continues that the relationship went downhill three years ago, when she stopped feeling sexual pleasure because she began to see him as foreign and frightening.

She silently consents to continue, but when Jim initiates forceful sex she struggles free and screams the safeword.

[17] Slave Play deals with the themes of race, sex, power relations, trauma, and interracial relationships.

[3] Aisha Harris, writing for The New York Times, said the play “bluntly confronts the lingering traumas of slavery on black Americans.

"[18] Through the reoccurring theme of psychoanalysis, Jeremy O. Harris examines how slavery still impacts both the mental states, and the relationships, of black people in the present.

[18] As Tonya Pinkins writes, racism does not have a safe word in the play, and throughout the narrative, white characters are forced to recognize their historical and social locations in relation to their partners.

[14] Author Jeremy O. Harris has said that he wrote Slave Play during his first year at the Yale School of Drama,[5] from which he graduated in 2019.

[20] In October 2017, a production of Slave Play was presented at the Yale School of Drama as part of the annual Langston Hughes Festival.

[23] The play was announced for the 2018–2019 season of the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW)[24] and was taken into the development program of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center.

[25][26] Later that month, Robert O'Hara,[27] who had known Harris since his brief studies at De Paul University and was one of his teachers at Yale,[28] was announced as director.

[33][34] On September 18, 2019, the play ran and hosted a Broadway Blackout night where the audience consisted of only black identified artists, writers, or students.

[39] In June 2020, the producers and creative team of Slave Play made a donation of $10,000 (~$11,599 in 2023) to the National Bailout Fund and released a statement in support of Black Lives Matter.

[40] In September 2021, it was announced that a new engagement of the play will run at the August Wilson Theatre from November 23, 2021, to January 23, 2022, with plans to then transfer to Los Angeles.

Most of the cast returned, with the exception of Joaquina Kalukango, due to a prior commitment to the pre-Broadway run of Paradise Square; she was replaced by Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, who originated the role of Kaneisha at the Yale School of Drama.

[41] The production later transferred to the Center Theatre Group's Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles from February 9 to March 13, 2022, after plans to stage it in 2020 were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The show began performances 29 June 2024 at the Noël Coward Theatre and is scheduled to run through 21 September 2024.

Appearing in the cast are Fisayo Akinade, Kit Harington, Aaron Heffernan, and Olivia Washington, alongside James Cusati-Moyer, Chalia La Tour, Annie McNamara, and Irene Sofia Lucio reprising their roles from the original Broadway production.

[43][44] "Black Out" nights return in this run, wherein two performances will be exclusively available for black-identifying audience members, facilitated through partnerships with outside organizations.

[49] In particular, audience members and writers have criticized the play for its treatment of Black women characters, and voicing that it disrespects the violent history of rape in chattel slavery.

[8] Peter Marks describes the play as funny and scalding, while Sara Holden wrote that Harris manages to make every character an archetype while at the same giving them depth.

[2] Juan Michael Porter II, a Black theater writer, reviewed the play as consisting of oversimplified confessions meant to titillate the audience.

[55] The black out performances were replicated in the London run of the play which led to criticism by a spokesperson for the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak that they were "wrong and divisive".