Even sharing a stage with a naked Alan Cumming, the swimming pool steals the show in “‘Daddy,’” the turgid new play by the seriously talented Jeremy O. Harris, which opened on Tuesday night at the Pershing Square Signature Center. This elegant, limpid rectangle runs across the front of Matt Saunders’s David Hockney-style evocation of a California pleasure palace. It embodies, in other words, the same exciting traits that characterized Mr. Harris’s dazzling “Slave Play,” seen earlier this season at the New York Theater Workshop. Such elements are otherwise lacking in this portrait of a corrosive love affair between a young black artist (Ronald Peet) and an older, richer white man (Mr. Cumming, in Mephistophelean mode). This no doubt comes as surprising news to theatergoers rattled and roiled by “Slave Play,” which assessed the warping grasp of America’s slave-owning past on latter-day interracial sexual relationships.

Source: New York Times March 06, 2019 02:37 UTC