There comes a point in every Dave Harris play when the world falters, and something disturbingly true tumbles out.
In Exception to the Rule (running through October 27 at DC’s Studio Theatre), an innercity detention classroom is plunged into surreal darkness. Soon, a seemingly straight-laced student Erika reveals a harrowing account of the ruptures in her identity. In Incendiary (which had its world premiere at DC’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in the summer of 2023), a mother Tanya goes on a wacky, madcap adventure to free her incarcerated son from prison. In a thrilling reversal, the audience quickly realizes Tanya’s death drive is hopelessly misguided, and we understand the horrific truths underpinning the farce.
Then there’s Tambo and Bones (which tours across the UK next summer), and its triplet reveals. The play moves from an existential comedy to a rap concert to an Afrofuturist world, each time folding in strangely specific details and histories within the dialogue. These moments feel like Harris dancing through his self-written chaos to catch a brief glimpse of the audience. Even though this dance is well choreographed, it’s still disarming for audiences to immediately match Harris’ gaze.
Over the past year and a half, I’ve reviewed the DC productions of Exception to the Rule and Incendiary. Although Dave Harris started as a poet and even published a poetry collection, Patricide, in 2019, his theatrical breakthrough came in 2022 when he had two plays off-Broadway within the same year. These were Tambo and Bones at Playwrights Horizons (directed by Taylor Reynolds, a director who often works in DC), and Exception to the Rule at Roundabout Theatre Company (directed by Miranda Haymon, who previously had a fellowship at Arena Stage).
Although I’ve found Harris’ works thrilling in their surprising structures and twists, I’ve also felt the DC audiences around me shifting in their seats with discomfort, both physical and emotional. Maybe Harris’ truths are too disturbing to accept with immediate grace. Maybe we’re all just trying to understand how the theatrical worlds we’ve been living in have transformed — or rather how Harris transforms the world we live in every day. In any case, engaging with a Dave Harris play isn’t easy: It can be simultaneously pleasurable, painful, hilarious, and terrifying. Still, it’s my hope that the DC community rises to the occasion.
When I spoke to Dave Harris over Zoom earlier this month, he was candid about how his personal life shapes his playwriting (perhaps more candid than any playwright I’ve interviewed so far). He told me that Exception to the Rule is very much drawn from his experiences. Like the characters in the show, specifically Erika, he struggles with how leaving the community in which he was raised is both a gain and a loss.
Harris was born in Los Angeles but grew up in West Philly. In sixth grade, he started attending an all-boys private school, where he was one of a handful of students of color. He says this all happened during “a really rough time,” while his family was evicted from their home and was sleeping on couches. His mother saw Harris’ education as an opportunity.
“Something she said to me as a kid was ‘You have to be able to see beyond your block,’ and like ‘You’re going to be the one that finally gonna escape this place,’” Harris says. “So she kind of gave me that mentality. Again, she didn’t do it with any malicious intent. She didn’t even really know what she was sending me to. She just had inherited this idea that this other place is better, and if you go there and be there, you’ll do something better. You won’t have to live like us.”
Although he purposefully didn’t share this fact much when Exception to the Rule premiered off-Broadway in 2022, Harris started writing it as an undergrad sophomore at Yale. It was his attempt to reckon with his adolescence, when academic success and his family felt increasingly distant.
“Suddenly I was like, ‘Oh, I’m living two completely different worlds, and these things are becoming split from each other,’” Harris says.
In his private school, Harris participated in extracurricular activities, honed his writing practice, traveled across the country, and got into every college where he applied. Despite all of this success, he still realized in college how much he’d sacrificed in order to get where he was.
“I ate that shit up, and then I got to college and was like, ‘Wow, I’ve turned my back on so much,’” Harris says. “And also this place I’m at is just as fucked. Also, this place I’m at tokenizes me and has done all of these things, like I’ve changed myself so much in order to earn a dead white man’s approval. And that was sort of the crisis that led to Exception to the Rule.”
Black upward mobility is a throughline in all of Harris’ playwriting — it’s an internal conflict he externalizes and then connects to larger Black American histories. For example, the two main characters of Tambo and Bones are “clowns” who gain success by performing minstrel-like shows for a white audience, in both historical and allegorical performances.
Harris wrote Tambo and Bones after Exception to the Rule when he realized there was a market and appetite for Black struggle narratives. Characters might try to escape detention in Exception to the Rule, but in Tambo and Bones, characters can’t escape society or history.
“We’re watching characters try to escape, and we find with each act, they escape somewhere further, they ascend further and further,” Harris says of Tambo and Bones. “Nothing fills the original hole. The question that they will have to confront is that original void. Is that void caused by the loss of home? Caused by slavery and oppression and 400 years? Is that void just human nature, and actually all of us are trying to fill something?”
Part of Harris’ critique in Tambo and Bones extends to the audience itself. There’s even a metatheatrical address in the play that calls attention to the racial dynamics in the audience. Tambo addresses an audience that, in the world of the show, is Black — but in production, the actor will likely be performing in front of a mostly white crowd. Tambo asks, “How could anyone know freedom in a world where they are always being watched?”
Harris isn’t alone in questioning how dramatists of color can live under a threatening white gaze — I’ve also written about that struggle in this publication. Although writers of color feel this most acutely, every writer must struggle with a thorny question: Who do you write for? Slave Play playwright Jeremy O. Harris encourages other Black playwrights to “make black art for your black self.” Cost of Living playwright Martyna Majok expresses her goal of writing for and about her friends and family. Alternatively, experimental Black playwrights like Michael R. Jackson and Jackie Sibblies Drury build entire shows confronting a white gaze. I’ve personally been haunted by words from poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong, who writes, “Even to declare that I’m writing for myself would still mean I’m writing to a part of me that wants to please white people.”
I bring up this question with Harris, who has multiple responses to it. Similar to Hong, he believes that even if there’s part of yourself that thinks about a white audience, “that doesn’t make it any less you.” Similar to Majok, he writes to make his friends laugh, especially his fellow playwright friend Maura Nelson-Greenberg. Simultaneously, he acknowledges that his characters and plays live separately from his life.
“I had a poetry professor, Elizabeth Alexander,” he says. “One of the quotes she would always say is that as soon as you put something down, it kind of doesn’t belong to you anymore. You create something to look at yourself, and it can look back at you in a way. But the act of writing is the act of putting something impossible inside of you onto something else, and then leaving that for anyone else to read whatever they want into it.”
Harris also brings up how he’s increasingly aware of the commercial and capitalist forces that move behind a piece of artwork. He’s selective about what film and TV projects he chooses to join — he’s currently in the writing room for the Apple TV+ television show Widow’s Bay. Harris says he’s so selective because he wants to protect what draws him to writing in the first place.
“The hard thing is having to work on that side and also making sure I don’t lose the things that feel of my own impulse and the most inexplicable,” he says. “Inexplicable in the sense of, like, I’m chasing something I don’t actually know where it’s going.”
“There are maybe four places in the world where I feel most myself,” Harris continues, with a laugh. “It’s when I’m writing, cooking, dancing, and having sex are the places where I’m the most me. Things are happening before I have the ability to process where the impulse is coming from. When writing is best for me, it’s happening before I can think and be conscious of the forces affecting it. I love being in that space.”
Harris’ questioning of the film and television industry also extends to the theater world. Both off-Broadway productions of Exception to the Rule and Tambo and Bones were scheduled for 2020 — until the pandemic scrambled production plans, and the Omicron wave in 2022 continued to impact shows even when they were staged. Harris says he’s seeking a more “sustainable” relationship to productions of his plays.
“As exciting as it was and as proud I am of those productions, it was a really, really intense and really trying time,” he says. “It took more energy than I ought to have given to it. But partly I had been waiting so long, so we were just obsessed with it. I love theater so much and I have no intention of ever stopping. And also, I think what I took from that was I need to protect my energy and space, because it can really take a lot from me without giving a lot back.”
Harris sees himself as a writer first and foremost. That means he appreciates the collaboration process of production, but also acknowledges that his first love of theater didn’t come from seeing productions.
“I arrived to playwriting, and I never really saw any shows in New York,” he says. “I didn’t grow up going to plays. My whole understanding of theater was all through the literary art of it… Roundabout [Theatre Company] programmed my play before I had even seen a play at Roundabout.”
Harris also is frank about treating playwriting as literature — an art form that can be appreciated solely through reading. He values the written word the most of all.
“I’m so grateful for production, so many beautiful things happen inside of it,” he says. “Also in some ways — this might get me in trouble — it’s the part of the process I care the least about. To me, playwriting is a literary form. I come from a poetry background, and poetry and playwriting don’t exist separately for me. My love of theater came entirely from reading it, not from seeing it. So when I’m writing the play, the thing that I care the most about is the reader experience and my experience of reading and writing it. I feel so protective of that.”
Readers of Dave Harris’ plays will appreciate their innovative forms. The climaxes of both Exception to the Rule and Incendiary are startling monologues — ones that, like an Adrienne Kennedy one-act, break theatrical form and radically discuss the potential filth, disgust, and madness of Black culture. This is particularly true of Incendiary, in which audiences finally face the character of Eric (Tanya’s incarcerated son), and he delivers some shockingly masochistic lines about murder. When I saw the Woolly Mammoth production last summer, those lines elicited scoffs, gasps, and nervous laughter. We had reached a vertiginous breaking point.
Harris says that it’s important for him to earn those shocks, both for the characters and himself.
“Part of the reason why I think all of these monologues happen in my shows is because we’ve pushed the character through humor and spectacle and rhythm,” Harris says. “A lot of my plays have a certain rhythm that they operate inside of, we’re using that to push someone to the brink, where suddenly they have to say something that hasn’t come out yet. I think that is usually for me the experience of writing, where I feel like sometimes I’m tricking myself through the journey to finally, inside of myself, realize something I hadn’t encountered before, or hadn’t let myself say, or let myself claim.”
Still, Harris doesn’t want us to completely abandon the humor and spectacle that came before these revelations. For him, writing is still a pleasurable experience.
“Even when my writing is at its worst, most laborious, it’s still really fun because I’m making myself laugh, and I’m surprising myself,” Harris says. “That exploration, I think, lets me go into some places that I think genuinely terrify me, and let me go into places where I’m confronting something that I’ve been afraid to say out loud for a long time.”
Harris’ mixture of confrontation and humor combines in his new play MANAKIN, which recently won the 2024 Relentless Award. Harris says it follows four generations of a family brought together by a wedding, and if it goes well, Satan will “bring an end to the tedium of mortal existence.” Even though he has no idea how it will be staged, he calls it his favorite play he’s written so far.
“There’s trauma about war, trauma around domestic abuse,” he says. “The play is very much a comedy. It’s fun! It’s funny the entire way through. It’s one where, in more ways than any other play, I think I’m very directly staring into the wound that is family.”
Family is also one of an audience that Harris thinks about a lot, especially as he pulls elements of his own life and transforms them into fictional plays. Sometimes, the reaction he gets isn’t always what he’s expecting.
“My mom saw the reading of Incendiary, and two pages in, she was weeping,” he says. “Then at the end, she was like, ‘Oh that was really good!’ And I was like, ‘Girl!’ I know there’s so much happening inside of you and this is the whole fucking thing, that I know you’re seeing this. I know you’re smart enough to connect the dots and know where it’s coming from. And also, like, you’re not able to share that or say that, and I respect that. Language is not everyone’s tool of moving through the world… I want so much for my family to have access to storytelling, to the ability to narrate for themselves who they are and why they are.”
Still, Harris’ writing has initiated discussions within his family that might never have occurred if not for his literature. Harris hadn’t spoken to his father for around 20 years, but after Patricide was published, Harris’ father reached out to him to meet in San Diego. When they met for coffee, his father brought a copy of Patricide in which he had taken notes.
“We had 20 years of shit to work through,” Harris says. “He was a very problematic figure in a lot of ways. And also I was like, ‘You’re putting in the work to understand this.’ I had to put so much work to understand my family and who I am inside of it. And for the first time, it was like someone else meeting that work with their work. Just the fact of that was really powerful. Suddenly in that moment, I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ What I would want for my family is not just a silent understanding of the shared memory, but also a sense of ‘We can all language our way through this.’”
Harris and I are not that far apart in age: He graduated from Yale in 2016 and I started undergrad at the closeby Wesleyan University in 2017. We’re not necessarily united in the same community — our differences in upbringing and identity are stark, and I hope to respect them. At the same time, I wonder if there’s a generational affinity among us: people born in the mid-to-late ’90s, young millennials but elder Gen Z.
The confrontational, radical monologues of Harris remind me of what scholar Werner Sollors once wrote of Adrienne Kennedy’s plays: “Kennedy’s most important works explore the tragic condition of daughter, mother, father, sibling, and lover in a painful web of American race and kin relations in which violence can erupt at any point.” Harris extends Kennedy’s “painful web of American race and kin relations” to the violent present day. Our generation has benefited from diversity initiatives only to see us tokenized and those initiatives made illegal; we’re asked to study and work in increasingly impossible circumstances; we’re tasked with saving the current world even as it’s clearly in the process of collapse.
Exception to the Rule, Tambo and Bones, Incendiary, and now MANAKIN don’t seek to save the world, nor do they provide definitive answers or catharsis for audiences. Still, there’s something freeing in the way Dave Harris incorporates the full breadth of life within his plays. Violence can erupt at any time in Harris’ plays, but laughter can erupt at any time, too. Harris might show us how to live in the unpredictable world we call home. If his plays’ truths are too disturbing to accept with immediate grace, maybe grace can grow in our memories of reading and seeing his shows. It’s certainly grown in my memories.
Exception to the Rule plays through October 27, 2024, in the Mead Theatre at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th Street NW, Washington, DC. For tickets ($42–$93, with low-cost options and discounts available), go online or call the box office at 202-332-3300.
Running Time: Approximately 80 minutes with no intermission.The program for Exception to the Rule is online here.
COVID Safety: All performances are mask recommended. Studio Theatre’s complete Health and Safety protocols are here.
