“My master was, to my knowledge, the father of eleven slaves. Children of every shade of complexion play with [the mistress’s] own fair babies, and too well she knows that they are born unto him of his own household.” —HARRIET JACOBS/LINDA BRENT, INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
In the antebellum plantation home, Mama’s baby was Papa’s maybe. Domestic slavery required a total subjection of the body. Reduced from personhood to quantifiable material, the slave became an object of absolute abjection on the one hand, and a site for the projection of uninhibited physical and sexual potency on the other. Fear and desire are entangled in the captive flesh.
SLAVE PLAY
A fear of miscegenation undergirds a distinctly American fixation with black bodies. The swirl, jungle fever, salt and pepper—those fears that fueled the birth of a nation. Is sex work? And if it is, can sex-work work as liberation from the traumas of enslavement? These are the questions at the heart of Slave Play, an elusive drama about the power of sexual fantasy play, where submission and dominance work in knotted tandem towards bodily transcendence. They are questions that strike at the uneasy heart of the American psyche and recall Hortense Spillers’ assertion that American slavery is “one of the richest displays of the psychoanalytic dimensions of culture.” Slave Play exposes our captive fantasies to illustrate the uncanny contours of colonized desire, historical trauma, and sexual entanglement. —AMAUTA M. FIRMINO, PRODUCTION DRAMATURG
Thursday, October 26 at 8PM Friday, October 27 at 4PM and 8PM Saturday, October 28 at 4PM Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel Street
FRONT IMAGE: George Cruikshank’s: The New Union Club: being a representation of what took place at a celebrated dinner given by a celebrated society (1819), courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University and The British Museum, London.
The Studio Series productions are designed to be learning experiences that complement classroom work, providing a medium for students at Yale School of Drama to combine their individual talents and energies toward the staging of collaboratively created works.
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