âItâs More Money Than I Imagined.â So Heâs Giving Some of It Away.
How Jeremy O. Harris has turned his good fortune into grants, commissions and donations to other playwrights, and to libraries in need.
Jeremy O. Harris at the closing of the Broadway production of âSlave Play.âCredit.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
Jeremy O. Harris is a playwright, a performer, and a provocateur. And now, heâs a philanthropist.
The 31-year-old author of âSlave Play,â which is nominated for 12 Tony Awards, emerged during the pandemic not only as a vocal advocate for the beleaguered theater industry, but also as someone determined to model generosity.
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Left: Samuel Delany (photo: Michael S. Writz) Right: Jeremy O. Harris (photo: Marc J. Franklin)
At three in the afternoon on a Friday in late January, Jeremy O. Harris arranged for an Uber to bring Samuel Delany from his home in Philadelphia to the Golden Theatre in New York City. Chip, as the famed writer of science fiction, memoir, essays, and criticism prefers to be called, arrived in Times Square around seven that evening to watch one of the last performances of Harris’s Slave Play on Broadway.
Though the two had never met before, Delany has been hugely influential on Harris, and served as the basis for a character in the latter’s 2019 Black Exhibition