Olivia Washington – daughter of Hollywood actor Denzel Washington – has said in past interviews that she was a shy child. But if there’s any modicum of wallflower left in her, she’s definitely making the wrong career choices. Not only was her 2023 show – an absurdist comedy called I’m a Virgo that saw her acting mostly with a puppet – the talk of the town, but her new theatre work Slave Play is causing no end of controversy.
Written by Jeremy O. Harris – who some will recognise as petulant fashion designer Grégory Duprée from Emily in Paris – Slave Play is centred on three interracial couples and their ideas of race, sexuality and identity. It garnered a record number of Tony nominations after its initial Broadway run, and has just opened in London.
When the UK organisers declared that two nights of the 12-week run would be “Black Out” nights for Black theatregoers, even the country’s former prime minister Rishi Sunak weighed in, calling the idea “concerning” and “divisive”. {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"ImageObject","caption":"Actor and playwright Jeremy O.
Harris wrote Slave Play and will reappear in the upcoming season of Emily in Paris. Photo: @estreetprods/Instagram","url":"https://img.i-scmp.
com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1024,format=auto/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/2024/08/07/44e3dce6-0aa5-4ebf-9bcc-ad679b183570_de019856.jpg"} Actor and playwright Jeremy O. Harris wrote Slave Play and will reappear in the up.