Playwright Jeremy O. Harris photographed on March 22, 2019 on 42nd Street in front of Pershing Square Signature Center/Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre in New York City. Portrait by Kevin Buitrago for PIN–UP.

To say that Jeremy O. Harris is the theater world’s current wunderkind is an understatement. Since the beginning of this year, the 29-year-old has had not one but two sold-out Off-Broadway shows — Slave Play at New York Theatre Workshop and “Daddy” at the Frank Gehry-designed Pershing Square Signature Center — all the while continuing his playwriting studies at Yale School of Drama (the title of his thesis: YELL: a documentary of my time here). Harris, who hails from Virginia and previously lived in Los Angeles, has a way of serving deceptively simple narratives that are in fact rich layer cakes of complex issues like class, power, race, and sex, the full weight of which slowly creeps up on viewers like pounds over winter. “Daddy”’s main character is Franklin, a young Black artist who starts a relationship with an older, wealthy, European collector. But an equally important player in the script is the giant pool that set designer Matt Saunders sunk at the center of the stage. It is here, in the wet of it, that at least 50 percent of the action takes place: swimming, playing, praying, and, of course, fucking. Part Hockney, part anonymously aspirational boutique hotel, the pool and its surrounding architecture of aestheticized strangeness offer the perfect backdrop for “Daddy”’s plot of dramatized queer subconscious. (Read Miles Gertler’s essay on “Daddy”’s set design here.) “Daddy”’s plot and tone straddle the line between the specific and the universal, blending unapologetically contemporary language and allusions with classic tropes from theater, cinema, TV, and Black churches, the latter in the form of a small all-female choir. So varied are the references, and so comfortable is Harris in talking about them, that the best way to interview him is by suggesting words and simply letting him riff uninterrupted on some of “Daddy”’s big themes. PIN–UP did just that, one week before the show closed, and also got unprecedented access to photograph the cast backstage. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Jeremy O. Harris!

Backstage on the set of “Daddy” at the Pershing Square Signature Center/Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre in New York City. Photographed on March 22, 2019 by Kevin Buitrago for PIN–UP.