Those seated in the front row of “Daddy” should prepare to get wet. Yes, there is an actual swimming pool, set in front of a glassy, modernist house in the Hollywood hills, a David Hockney come to life. “This is our time,” howls Hari Nef, playing a gallerist who represents a young Black artist. “We can be outlandish and brazen and unsafe and careless,” she says. “All those things the big boys have been able to be forever.” She’s referring to women, people of color, and everyone else who’s been shoved aside by those she mordantly calls “the white cis het blowhard art bros of the past.”
Of course, she’s also talking about Jeremy O. Harris, whose daring play overflows past the boundaries of convention just as water does from the pool on stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center, where it opened off-Broadway tonight. An opulent joint production of The New Group and Vineyard Theatre directed by Danya Taymor, “Daddy” (intentionally in quotes) turns inside-out the subconscious of an artist — young, Black, and queer — striving in a world built by and for aforementioned blowhards.
This by itself is like a gust of fresh air, considering how often Black experience has recently been co-opted and packaged for consumption by white creators. And it’s no surprise that the tangled contents of an artist’s mind — tortured by inherited racial trauma, an absent father, a lapse of faith — should flood any single canvas. But ultimately the play quite literally cannot be contained. Though “Daddy” is invigorating, provocative, and often wildly entertaining, audiences may be forgiven for eventually feeling lost, overwhelmed, and a vague urge to call out for their own to take them home to bed.
The play, which Harris subtitles “a melodrama,” spills over in nearly every sense. (Clocking in close to three hours with two intermissions, time isn’t the least of them.) That budding artist (played by Ronald Peet) and his elder patron and lover (Alan Cumming), whom we meet rolling on molly in the opening scene, frequently spill out of their clothes and into the pool. When the artist’s roiling psyche breaches the confines of his imagination, the cast pulls out hand mics and breaks into George Michael’s “Father Figure.” Did I mention there’s a gospel choir?
The artist moves in after that first night, seemingly another object in a collection. Cumming’s character pet names him “Naomi,” as in Campbell, and takes to spanking him. The young man’s friends (played by Tommy Dorfman and Kahyun Kim) gather to gossip in the sun about their various adventures in sugar baby-ing. Like much of Harris’ play, it’s “so L.A.” as the three of them might say. But it’s more than mere metaphor. We watch as the young artist becomes increasingly and curiously more childlike, sucking his patron’s thumb, calling him “daddy,” and regressing to impetuousness.
For his first solo show, the artist constructs miniature dolls — what his mother (played by Charlayne Woodard) calls “coon babies” — finely dressed to please. When that exhibit sells out, he moves on to fashioning life-size fabrications of himself, his mom (who arrives, after several unanswered voicemails, to rescue him from the white devil, or “methuselah” as she calls him), and Cumming’s wealthy collector, his adopted father figure. The puppets lend a macabre pageantry to Harris’ drama in their theatrical use of material and form. As psychological art, they come to feel overdetermined. (The boy started playing with dolls when his father abandoned the family.)
A surfeit of cunning insight — on art, sex, power, faith, subjectivity, and coming of age from the margins, to name a few — is far more than one can reasonably expect from even the most established and revered playwrights in American theatre, much less one who’s not yet out of graduate school. On that first euphoric night, Harris’ young artist explains that his work “[recontextualizes] what it means to be a Black man.” Harris aims to do far more than just that, as already evidenced by Slave Play, his professional debut last fall. Fortunately for us, he’s just getting started.
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Follow Naveen Kumar on Twitter: @Mr_NaveenKumar
(photos: monique carboni)
