OUTSIDE MAN

Jeremy O. Harris, before and after "Slave Play."

- VINSON CUNNINGHAM

When the first coronavirus lockdowns went into effect, and the global mood was a moan of quiet agitation and fear, the playwright Jeremy O. Harris was living in a two-story apartment in London. He had travelled there for a production of his play “Daddy,” about a young Black artist who has fallen under the thrall of an older white man. “Daddy” had débuted, Off Broadway, a year before, and was set to open at the Almeida Theatre at the end of March, 2020; it would have been Harris’s first professional opening overseas. But the show didn’t open, and Harris stayed stranded in London for weeks, then, eventually, for months.

Sad about the play and scared about the world, he passed the first few weeks not writing—although many deadlines, constant companions in his life, hovered at the peripheries of his mind. Since high school, Harris has used the late night and earliest morning as a time to work and party and talk about art with friends; now he binged anime and listened to Fiona Apple and started reading Audre Lorde’s “Sister Outsider,” which he’d always meant to get to. As the weeks wore on, he tired of his vampirism. “I decided that I wanted to see the sun more often,” he said one April morning, as streams of light made bright rectangles on the apartment walls. Waking up at normal hours meant dealing with pedestrian annoyances. He’d begun ordering coffee from a nearby café, and twice in a row, although he ordered it black, it was delivered with milk. “It’s, like, everyone’s watching ‘The Plot Against America,’” he said, referring to the HBO miniseries based on the novel by Philip Roth, “and this feels very much like ‘The Plot Against Jeremy.’ ”