Slave Play may not have won any Tonys at last night’s ceremony, but the groundbreaking show isn’t coming up empty-handed. The play announced on September 27 that it will be returning to Broadway for an eight-week run, with previews beginning November 23 and the show officially reopening on December 3. The production will run at the August Wilson Theatre through January 23 before moving to Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum as part of Center Theater Group’s season. Tony nominee Robert O’Hara returns to direct, with Tony–nominated cast members Ato Blankson-Wood, Chalia La Tour, and Annie McNamara returning alongside fellow original Broadway cast members Irene Sofia Lucio and Paul Alexander Nolan. Antoinette Crowe-Legacy will join in the role of Kaneisha, which she originated in 2017 during Yale’s Langston Hughes Festival.
Slave Play entered Tonys night with 12 nominations, the most for a single play production in history. The show also made waves on Broadway for having accessible ticket prices and booking “Black Out†performances for all-Black audiences; the new run will set aside over 10,000 tickets at $39 and book more Black Out performances. “Slay Play’s return engagement marks for me a chance for New York and the world to re-meet a play that many met at New York Theatre Workshop and Broadway in 2018 and 2019, and that thousands of others met in its published edition in a year when theaters around the world were dark,†said Tony-nominated writer Jeremy O. Harris in a statement. “To be doing it in 2021 with the Kaneisha who originated the role at Yale and members of the original cast fills me with the same joy I had I had watching the play for the very first time in a classroom five years ago.â€