Much like his character, the all-star “college bound” Erika in Exception to the Rule, Dave Harris’s career and personal trajectory has been a story of perseverance in predominantly white institutions. Harris was born in Los Angeles and spent his childhood in West Philadelphia, a journey he describes as “a reverse trajectory of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” In fifth grade, he transferred from an integrated elementary school to a private all boys’ school where he was one of the only Black students. Looking back, Harris says navigating that predominantly white environment taught him a great deal about performance. “I learned how to manipulate language to make it easier to move through the world” he recalls. “For example, if I used racially coded language in one context, I would get demonized, but if I used it in another, I would be seen as special, or competitive. I turned it into a kind of game that started from a place of pain but eventually became kind of fun—I became good at it.” He adds, wryly, “I’m probably going to have to unpack that for the rest of my life.”
Despite being a part of the Philadelphia Young Playwrights Group and writing plays throughout his teens, it never occurred to him that playwriting was a career he could pursue. “No one in my family had done the four-year college experience, so I was like: if I go to college, I have to do something that sounds legit. I’m gonna work in a lab because you can’t fuck with that.” It was ultimately a life-altering advice from one of his Yale professors that convinced him to take the leap into a career in the professional theatre. “Halfway through undergrad, I had a teacher, Deb Margolin, who slapped me upside the head and was like, ‘All the people in your life didn’t work as hard as they did for you to go off and do something that you don’t love.’ And it kind of hit: So many people in my family work from a place of fear and not from a place of desire.” It was a risk that eventually paid off.
Harris is not only lauded as one of the leading contemporary voices of the American Theatre but has achieved immense respect for deftly tackling race in America through his writing. “Harris argues for a more holistic interpretation of Black productions that leaves space for Black folks to saunter in the shapelessness of expressive performance without concern for respectability,” writes Folasade Adesanya in The Kitchen Magazine. Harris has an exceptional skill for addressing present-day racial politics with historical awareness, presenting these narratives with a modern sensibility. “I think we’re more adjusted to seeing a kind of Black struggle narrative. Which is valid, but also it’s exciting to me that plays are bringing 2022 ideas of Blackness into the space. I wrote [Exception to the Rule] with the kids I grew up with in mind. And so we’re bringing in energy where we’re like, we’re gonna curse every other word,” Harris says. “I don’t take any audience for granted, but that’s part of the fun and the chaos.”
And though Harris’s work tends to have a wide appeal through its heightened metaphorical undertones, he never shies away from making bold and even unsettling choices which at times disrupt comfortable ideas of what a Black playwright can bring to the table. “One of my first professional play readings ever was at the Great Plains Theatre Conference for my play White History,” Harris recalls. “I remember when the play was over, this older Black director stood up and was like, ‘I’ve never been more offended in my life. I spit on this play,’ and then he mimed spitting on the ground. So yeah, out the gate, much of my writing is battling to deeply complicate and push against a dominant narrative within a community to reach someplace new.”
Among Harris’s other work is the satirical Everybody Black which Harris describes as : “Mad Black Historian has been commissioned by a group of white historians to chronicle The Black Experience™ for a time capsule that’s going to be launched into space for aliens to someday discover.” The play premiered at Actors Theatre of Louisville as a part of their Humana Festival of New American Plays in 2019 to positive reviews. “Everybody Black forces us to confront how much has indeed been boxed in,” wrote the Louisville Public Media. Incendiary, which premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in 2023, follows Tanya, a black mother who is “determined to break her son out of death row—or die trying.” The Washington Post praised the play’s commentary on “America’s gun culture, our affinity for violence, the pipeline that feeds Black men into hopeless spells behind bars.”
In Tambo & Bones, which premiered in a 2022 co-production between Playwrights Horizons in New York and Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, Harris traps two black men trapped in a minstrel show. In the show description, Harris writes: “Their escape plan is to get out, and get even in a rags-to-riches journey that roasts America's racist history, and how it affects America's racist present.” The play was subsequently produced at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre where it was called “Bold, disturbing, raw...thought-provoking…nobody gets away clean” by The Chicago Reader.
Harris’s impulse to push against the boundaries of expectations that are so often put around the work of BIPOC artists comes from the need to be inventive with every new play he writes. Often, playwrights develop a specific aesthetic that defines their work body—whether that’s a particular genre they write in, or a subject matter they’re continuously obsessed with, or even the characters they repeatedly write about. This aesthetic gives the audience a sense of each playwright’s larger perspective and politics. Harris, on the other hand, has no allegiance to a particular form or content that can easily define his body of work. “I think every single one of my plays is formally very different from the last play. That’s the thing that excites me as a writer. Like Exception to the Rule is a single set / six actors on a stage, just acting their asses off. And now that the play is there, I won’t ever write another play like that.”
Harris’s many productions in a relatively short time have catapulted him into the American theatre just as it’s recovering from the setbacks of the Covid-19 Pandemic. It is exciting to say the least where Harris’s playwriting journey will take him next and what new set of characters and brave new world he might surprise us with next.
—Gursimrat Kaur