Even sharing a stage with a naked Alan Cumming, the swimming pool steals the show in “‘Daddy,’” the turgid new play by the seriously talented Jeremy O. Harris, which opened on Tuesday night at the Pershing Square Signature Center. This elegant, limpid rectangle runs across the front of Matt Saunders’s David Hockney-style evocation of a California pleasure palace.
And though it never speaks a word, the appropriately named infinity pool — filled with water that sloshes into the front rows of the audience — ripples with eloquent promises of endless fluidity, hidden depths and boundary-crossing danger. It embodies, in other words, the same exciting traits that characterized Mr. Harris’s dazzling “Slave Play,” seen earlier this season at the New York Theater Workshop.
Such elements are otherwise lacking in this portrait of a corrosive love affair between a young black artist (Ronald Peet) and an older, richer white man (Mr. Cumming, in Mephistophelean mode). This no doubt comes as surprising news to theatergoers rattled and roiled by “Slave Play,” which assessed the warping grasp of America’s slave-owning past on latter-day interracial sexual relationships.
On paper, “‘Daddy’” — directed by Danya Taymor and featuring the formidable Charlayne Woodard as an avenging mother — seems like it could surpass the outrageousness of “Slave Play.” It features what may be the strangest karaoke performance in New York right now: A sopping wet Mr. Cumming, holding a hand mic and backed by a gospel trio, sways in the middle of the pool while delivering a smoky-voiced rendition of a George Michael pop hit.
The song is “Father Figure,” which here sounds a lot creepier than it did when it ruled the air waves three decades ago. Its lyrics are a declaration of love in which the singer vows to be “your preacher teacher / Anything you have in mind,” while adding that “sometimes love can be mistaken / For a crime.”
Certainly, the words are a perfect fit for Andre, Mr. Cumming’s character, a Los Angeles art collector who wants to add the impressionable and beautiful Franklin (Mr. Peet) to his trove of expensive possessions. The lyrics also reflect the ruling compulsion of Franklin, who has been searching for someone to fill a void left by the father he never knew.
By the time this musical moment arrives, toward the end of the first act (of three), it simply restates what we’ve been hearing since the play began. Even if you assume the number is a fantasy, taking place in Franklin’s fevered mind, it neither advances nor enhances the show’s story or its central relationship. It merely belabors the obvious.
In an earlier version, “‘Daddy’” was the script that got Mr. Harris into the Yale School of Drama, and it feels like the work of an untested artist, especially compared with the flamboyantly assured “Slave Play.” Though confrontational from its beginning — in which a white man and a black woman enacted the rape of a plantation worker in what turned out to be a sex workshop — “Slave Play” also operated by stealth, concluding with an inspired and emotional sucker punch.
In contrast, “‘Daddy,’” a coproduction of the New Group and the Vineyard Theater, wears its subtext like a sandwich board sign. In the first scene, an MDMA-drugged Franklin says to Andre, whom he’s just met at a wild party, “I can’t shut up — sometimes I just like say and say and say everything I’ve ever thought.”
That’s a fair description of “‘Daddy,’” too. Mr. Harris appears to have been influenced by both Eugene O’Neill’s “Strange Interlude” — the 1928 Freud-steeped drama in which characters say what they’re really thinking to the audience — and the work of Thomas Bradshaw (“Burning,” “Intimacy”), a contemporary playwright for whom the id is always on the surface.
But while Mr. Bradshaw’s writing pulses with a rushing sense of the primal, “‘Daddy’” always seems to be annotating rather than expressing its characters’ impulses. It could have been written by the exhaustingly self-conscious Franklin, who specializes in creating “these weird dolls of black boys,” as he describes them, “possibly me, all naked, deformed.”
It is thus queasily appropriate that Franklin is co-opted by Andre, who seems to regard his new lover and protégé as the most collectible of human dolls. (He calls him “my little Naomi,” in reference to the fashion model Naomi Campbell.) Andre installs Franklin in his hillside mansion, where the young man learns to call his lover “Daddy,” while engaging in graphically rendered sex that includes infantile thumb-sucking and bare-bottomed spanking.
Others soon invade this cozy ménage. They include Franklin’s chums Max (Tommy Dorfman) and Bellamy (Kahyun Kim) — pretty, young and vacuous materialists — and his gallerist, Alessia (Hari Nef, in the production’s sharpest satirical performance). Then there’s a less welcome visitor: Zora (Ms. Woodard), Franklin’s Bible-quoting mother, who is determined to save her son’s soul.
Such conflicts are the stuff of old-fashioned potboilers. And Mr. Harris has subtitled his play “A Melodrama.” Yet even when the participants are wet, screaming and, in the cases of its male leads, nude, the confrontations feel academic. And while Ms. Taymor keeps the play moving briskly (against the odds), even the spanking sequences register as more cerebral than physical.
As for the talk, it is endless and circular and repetitive. It includes famous-name-laden discussions of the intrinsic value of art, a monologue about the fatalism of mothers of black sons and an extended fantasy of patricide. And for every explicitly expressed concept, there is usually a big, fat external symbol. Franklin’s art advances from tiny dolls to life-size dummies that look like him, his mother and daddy Andre, to whom he fails to give a face.
Though he spends a lot of time trembling, as if from the exposure of being wet and naked, Mr. Peet’s Franklin is too unfailingly poised and articulate to engage us emotionally. Ms. Woodard, a first-rate actress, sometimes seems worn out by the sheer weight of the words she must deliver.
Mr. Cumming, who won a Tony Award as the satanic M.C. in the 1998 revival of “Cabaret,” here provides canny glimpses of the sad smallness of a man who believes he can buy love and respect with purchases from Tiffany and Hermes. And the gospel singers — Carrie Compere, Denise Manning and Onyie Nwachukwu — sound swell.
It should also be noted that the performances noticeably improve whenever the ensemble members are in the pool, which has been lighted like a movie star by Isabella Byrd. Perhaps this is because it’s the only time they’re allowed contact with something truly elemental and beyond words. Were there an award for best supporting body of water in a play, this highly expressive pool would be a shoo-in.
