Denzel Washington‘s daughter Olivia Washington and her “Slave Play” co-star are defending the production’s controversial approach to making the world of theater a more inclusive and diverse space.
Olivia and Kit Harington are the leads in the play that is being performed at the Noel Coward Theatre in London’s historic West End. The story, set on a plantation in the American South, is written by U.S. playwright and actor Jeremy O. Harris and earned a record 12 Tony nominations in 2021.
In February, its producers announced that two nights of the current 13-week run had been declared Black Out nights, encouraging Black people to fill the audience of the predominantly white space.
In a new BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg, the stars spoke out amid an outcry that the concept was divisive and a thinly veiled racist approach to excluding other ethnicities from supporting Harris’ work.
“I’ve come to realize and believe that it’s an incredibly positive thing and we had our first blackout night the other night. It was an incredible show. The energy on stage and in the audience was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” said the “Game of Thrones” actor Harington.
He said it was a great thing that the marginalized group of people could come and experience performance. Harington also explicitly stated blackout nights did not exclude non-Black people from purchasing tickets and attending the play. “To have the argument that ‘Oh, this is discriminating against white people,’ is, I think, vaguely strange and ridiculous.”
Olivia chimed in, adding, “To see Black and brown people in a 900-seat theater, I’d never experienced that as an audience member. … It was very special for me to experience in doing this play because, as you said, it is difficult, it’s a difficult subject matter. It can get difficult for people to hear, however, to feel supported by this room in a different kind of way. … It felt really great.”
“It’s a really positive thing”
— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) July 28, 2024
Slave Play actor Kit Harington defends dedicating certain nights to black audiences while co-star Olivia Washington says it was “special” to experience “black and brown people in a 900-seat theatre”
#BBCLauraK https://t.co/DM9e02dghy pic.twitter.com/fDmql867kO
Online detractors remained outraged by the Black Out nights. “This is racism, plain and simple,” someone posted on X. Someone else wrote, “I didn’t realise that race segregation had been brought in. Mandela fought to stop this sort of thing.”
Another said, “Because you know, black people can’t possibly enjoy a performance surrounded by white folks.
A fourt critic said that the idea was “apartheid, but progressive.”
Earlier this year, Harris explained to the BBC that the intention behind the controversial concept was to make theater more inclusive for all, including audiences who are not known “The idea of a Black Out night is to say: this is a night that we are specifically inviting black people to fill up the space, to feel safe with a lot of other black people in a place where they often do not feel safe,” he said in a “World at One” interview.
Moreover, he noted that “people have to be radically invited into a space to know that they belong there. In most places in the West, poor people and Black people have been told that they do not belong inside of the theater. … In America, Jim Crow existed to literally tell them that they could not sit in the same theater as white people.”
Despite the onslaught of criticism over blackout nights, a second discourse developed praising Olivia. The actress is the daughter of Academy Award winner and Broadway alumna Denzel Washington and Pauletta Washington.
The “Gladiator II” star previously bragged about his daughter, telling “Entertainment Tonight” in 2021 that she was “a wonderful young actor who’s coming after her brother. Her brother’s pretty good, but she’s really good.”
Her brother, their second child, John David Washington, has starred in the HBO series “Ballers” and big-budget box office flicks such as “Tenet” and “The Creator.”
Like his famous parents and younger sister, he too has taken up residency on the stage, most recently appearing alongside Samuel L. Jackson in the August Wilson play “The Piano Lesson.”
Like her brother, Olivia has made an effort to forge a successful onscreen career without heavily relying on her Hollywood pedigree. A fan commented, “I love how they don’t lead with that and are earning their spots. Only realized David was his offspring way after Ballers.” Although another individual was baffled by her stage work. They tweeted, “D—n, why is she doing trash theater tho’, let’s use that nepotism as intended!”
Olivia is simultaneously gaining praise for her inherited acting chops for her work on “I Am Virgo,” a series created by Boots Riley that is streaming on Prime Video.
