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The thirtysomething American playwright on confronting audiences, drawing on past traumas, and why he’s putting an infinity pool on stageThere are few people present in the Almeida theatre offices in London when Jeremy O Harris walks in on a Monday evening in March. He is wearing Gucci head-to-toe: a multicoloured check wool suit and, over it, a grey monogram coat embellished with small jewels that glitter intensely under the ceiling’s studio lights. Is this an everyday look, I wonder. “It’s the first day of rehearsal for Daddy,” Harris, 32, explains, “so it feels like a good way to be like: ‘Let’s get jazzy.’ It was also on loan so I have to give it back tomorrow.”Although we are indeed speaking on the first day of rehearsals for Daddy, which went on to open at the Almeida last month, it’s not Harris’s first time bringing the play to the UK. Original plans for it to debut in 2020 were quickly halted by the pandemic. “We were doing the play here two years ago today,” he says. “I think me and Danya [Taymor, the director] were downstairs with Rupert [Goold, artistic director] being like: ‘America just shut down the NBA, I think it’s probably gonna be game over for theatre.’” Sure enough, the Almeida theatre closed on 16 March 2020, and Harris found himself stuck in the UK, living in a flat in London until August. “I got very comfortable being in a foreign city during a very foreign time,” he says. Continue reading...