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How Chalia La Tour of ‘Slave Play’ Feels About Her Controversial Role
‘Slave Play’ is the most talked-about show on Broadway. Here’s how one of its stars stays level headed.
This article contains spoilers for the Broadway production of Slave Play and has been edited and condensed for clarity.
In Sister, Outsider Audre Lorde wrote, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” Chalia La Tour knows this — it’s why she became an actress.
La Tour grew up in Stockton, California performing in churches and community theaters. Inspired by her mother’s career as a dancer and her siblings’ natural inclination towards music, La Tour felt it was important to forge her own artistic path. She started out participating in youth theater programs, eventually got accepted into the Yale School of Drama and is now making her Broadway debut in one of the most buzzed about shows in recent theater history, Slave Play.
The highly successful and intensely polarizing new play, penned by Broadway’s youngest Black male playwright Jeremy O’Harris, has got audiences more than just talking. They are think-piecing, tweeting, and boycotting, too. The show follows three interracial couples who have volunteered for an experimental “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy.” Meaning, the Black and White partners play out archetypal sexual relationships from the Antebellum South (i.e. the White male overseer lusting after a slave woman or the White mistress in heat lusting after the house “mulatto”). The re-enactment of racial power dynamics is meant to function like a kink and reignite sexual intimacy between the partners, but winds up exposing them to some truly irreconcilable differences.
La Tour plays Teá, one of two Yale graduate therapists actually facilitating this radical sexual experiment. While her body is not as physically exploited as that of Joaquina Kalukango who plays “Kaneisha” or Anton Blankson-Wood who plays “Nigger Gary,” her character is still the victim of an acute type of violence, namely, microaggressions.
Since much of the play’s controversy revolves around the representation of Black women in theater, we wanted to actually…
