In 2018, I attended the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, a very white ski resort town that welcomes an overwhelmingly white influx of celebrities, filmmakers and film critics to its mountains every January. During the Q & A following a screening of “Blindspotting” — a movie that engages with police brutality against black people, systemic racial inequalities and gentrification — an older white woman in the audience asked the director if he was “afraid” while they were filming on location in Oakland, Calif. Instantly and jarringly, I was reminded of my other-ness within the room.

At a press screening of Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” several years ago, I sat through the dramatized depiction of the life of the slave Solomon Northup, in all of its austere, made-for-the-Oscars glory. After sitting through the subjugation of several black characters, especially Lupita Nyong’o’s Patsy, who is raped onscreen by her master and later suffers an excruciatingly unflinching whipping, I was emotionally drained by the weight of the horrors that had been depicted onscreen.

As the mostly white audience trickled out of the theater at the end, I overheard a man expressing relief to his companion: “I couldn’t last 12 minutes of all that, never mind 12 years!”

During the Black Out performance of “Slave Play,” I was shielded from having to endure such gross remarks for a couple of hours. Sure, it was awkward to see Kaneisha twerk to a Rihanna song in Mammy-ish garb for her white husband, who was dressed as a plantation overseer. Watching the researchers conducting the retreat (an interracial lesbian couple) lead the black participants in unpacking their resentment, anger and irritation toward their white partners was discomforting. (It also resurfaced many emotions based on my own past experiences with white romantic partners.) And it was difficult to sit with the play’s final moments, which involve a sexually violent and emotional catharsis.

But that night there seemed to be a fellowship among everyone, as people collectively gasped, provided audible ad-libs (“She’s crazy!” someone exclaimed, referring to the extremely oblivious and frequent interrupter Alana) and erupted into laughter or applause at some of the more outlandish or scabrous moments. If we all interpreted and felt about it differently, it still meant something to have the relief of freedom from judgment to express those responses.

There were fewer of us the second time I saw “Slave Play,” during one of the final preview showings last week. The audience was mostly white, and, unsurprisingly, that sense of community didn’t have quite the same power as it did during the Black Out. The audience was much more muted, though some of the show’s most pivotal moments and biggest comedic beats garnered similarly audible reactions.

It probably helped that I already knew what I was in for, but the experience wasn’t as uncomfortable as I thought it might be. It also doesn’t hurt that Harris’s script is clear in its intentions: The entire point of the therapy, and the reason the black characters desire to role-play antebellum fantasies, is because they want their partners to acknowledge their whiteness and the role racism plays in their every day lives.