“I’m just trying to get authentically to that,” the actress Stephanie Berry told her director, Whitney White, as they stood in a spacious rehearsal room in the East Village in mid-January. They were working out a bit of business that might or might not end up in “On Sugarland,” Aleshea Harris’s third full-length play, which premières at New York Theatre Workshop on March 3rd. “On Sugarland” was inspired by “Philoctetes,” Sophocles’ play about an expert archer plagued by chronic pain and exiled because of the smell of a wound on his foot. (A snake bit him while he was walking on sacred ground; so much for hubris.) Sophocles’ character may be powerful and gifted, but he is also set apart by the stench of his difference. Eventually, the god Heracles promises to heal Philoctetes’ foot if he returns to Troy to fight in the Trojan War. This is the mythology that jump-starts Harris’s new play, which is itself about mythology: one myth being that, by serving your country, you are protecting your community and yourself; another being that love can vanquish pain.
“On Sugarland” is sour with heartache and bristling with unexpected words and sounds. Saul (Billy Eugene Jones) is a vet who wants to reënlist, despite the fact that part of his foot was torn off in combat. Being in the military gives him an identity and makes him a model for his son, Addis (Caleb Eberhardt), who wants nothing more than to be a soldier, just like his dad. There is love in this story about the search for identity, but it’s a love surrounded by grief: Saul pines for a female officer who died in the service, and he’s the kind of guy who’s enthralled by the erotics of absence.
“On Sugarland” sharpens and expands on the overriding theme in Harris’s work: betrayal. In her plays, trust is often tenderly offered, like a flower, but then gets stomped on by the heavy boot of racism, sexism, loss, or patriarchal disregard. Just as Tennessee Williams made “deliberate cruelty” and its effect on difference one of the major concerns of his work, Harris aims to show how love can make you a target, especially when you think you’re safe in your own community. As in Toni Morrison’s novel “Sula” (1973), or Ntozake Shange’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage” (1980), or the “Greeks” section of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom” (1989), home, in Harris’s world, is not a shelter but a spirit house, a dream of a place not inhabited by male distance or neglect.
Some of Harris’s strongest characters, however, wish not to belong to any community at all. Take Evelyn (Berry). She doesn’t like where she lives—Sugarland is a community that Harris describes as “three mobile homes in a cul-de-sac in a small city in the South”—or its small-minded ways. Evelyn is in her late sixties, and she revels in knowing who she is, in dressing that self up and flaunting it, unlike her straitlaced sister, Tish, who just wants to fit in. (Evelyn is a wonderful, smart presence, part philosopher, part town critic, and part anarchic Sula.) She’s through with menstruation, she says, but she does bleed—from her eyes, from her nipples—which is what happens after she runs into her younger neighbor Saul, whom she is fond of. Evelyn is antiwar, and she despairs when Saul tells her that he wants to go back into the military. The world has so much beauty and wonder—why make it smaller with war and death? The scene that Berry and White were working on, with Jones, involved this question, and Berry was trying to “get to” something like shame as well as pride.
As the actress pondered her character’s intentions, Harris, who is forty, looked on quietly from a table that had been placed stage left. Petite but strong-limbed, with long dark hair and an open face that doesn’t look for the worst but doesn’t turn away from it, either, Harris studied the scene, and then studied her script, as a dramaturge, some tech people, and other actors worked nearby. Harris, who was dressed in jeans and a green-grayish knit top, was worried that what she called the “metatheatricality” of the piece might be getting rubbed away. “A lot of folx don’t think Black people can exist onstage unless the work is one of realism,” Harris has written. “ ‘On Sugarland’ begs to differ. It is aware of itself as a play and is not trying to be a work of realism or naturalism. . . . This play knows it is taking place in a theatre before an audience and thus, welcomes organic moments of metatheatricality.” But, for any theatricality, meta or otherwise, to work, the actors have to know how they’re moving around the stage, and why. Pointing to her chest, Harris said, “I like that Stephanie said she could say the line, but it had to come from here.” She put her hand down and reflected for a moment, then said, “Because she’s right. For sure sure. So, when Evelyn moves away from Saul, she’s not just walking away. There’s just so much . . .” She paused again, and Jones began to whistle a tune that wasn’t from “On Sugarland.” White asked him what he was whistling, and he admitted that it was a song from “Dreamgirls.” White and some of the crew started laughing; “Dreamgirls,” like “A Raisin in the Sun” and a number of other traditionally structured, popular shows about Black life, casts a shadow over any new production that’s not that. “I can’t! Every show!” White said, laughing the longest of all. “Let ‘Dreamgirls’ rest.”
“Ithink what I’m interested in is disrupting these really narrow ideas that people unfortunately still have about Blackness onstage,” Harris told me. It was a Sunday, a week and a half after the rehearsal, and we were having breakfast downtown, on the West Side. The play’s first previews were coming soon, and Harris was worried that the production was too rooted in the specific, with a set that materialized a world she had taken great pains to create as an atmosphere, filled with words and gestures, not stuff. She was afraid that, if there wasn’t “air around the words,” “On Sugarland” was in danger of becoming predictable, a palatable way of looking at Black lives and narratives. Harris’s aim as a playwright is to remove the kitchen sink and slather the stage with blood and celebration, the intimate sounds of a Black village, even when it offers little welcome. To get her points across, the playwright was clear in her notes and, sometimes, in her silence.
Harris’s first play produced in New York, “Is God Is” (2018), is suffused with bad memories. The ninety-minute work tells the story of legacy—and what it looks like, feels like, when one’s legacy is only bad news and violence. Racine and Anaia are twenty-one-year-old twins who were disfigured by a fire their father set when they were little girls. They don’t remember much about it, or about their father or their mother. But one day the sisters receive a letter from Mama; she’s living in a care home in the “dirty South” and wants to see her daughters before she dies. So they make the trip, and enter a nefarious world where women aren’t worth much, especially to one another.
In an extraordinary speech, She—the name that Harris gives to Racine and Anaia’s mother—tells the girls that she wants them to understand that she “ain’t just up and leave you.” On the day it happened, She says, their father wasn’t living with them anymore. She was starting to make dinner, but felt something funny in the house—another presence. In the bathroom, She found her children’s father standing behind the shower curtain. He’d broken into their sanctuary. “He pull the curtain aside,” She says. “And just stands there No smile or nothin. No frown, neither. Face as plain as a slice of wheat bread.” When he grabs her by the throat, she passes out, and wakes up to the smell of liquor that the father has soaked her in:
The stage direction that follows—“A sound like a thousand matches being struck simultaneously”—shook me to the core when I reread the play recently. I had a similar visceral reaction when I saw it at the SoHo Rep in 2018, brilliantly directed by Taibi Magar. I heard Suzan-Lori Parks’s distinctive early-career locutions in the dialogue, but, as the play continued, it became clear that Harris, like any young writer, needed her predecessors in order to get on with the business of being herself.
“Is God Is” was well received. Ben Brantley wrote, in the Times, “Step aside, Quentin Tarantino and Martin McDonagh, and all you macho purveyors of mutilation and mayhem with a smile. A snarly new master of high-octane carnage has risen into view.” But I felt that many critics were missing the point of this fierce and sad spectacle: that the violence, loss, neglect, and grief that affect so many Black families are handed down from generation to generation, and where do they come from, and where do they stop? What happened to the Black village where everyone looked out for everyone’s children?
Harris’s mother, a twenty-year veteran of the Army, raised Aleshea and her two brothers primarily on her own; Harris has no memory of her father being in her life. Although she was too young to recall the painful events of his separation from the family, she credits her mother for standing between her and “complete chaos.” As an adult, she tried to reach out to her father. “I had this phone conversation with him,” she told me. “He was blaming my mother. It was awful.” She paused. “I’m grown. He’s really grown. And I just said to myself, ‘This man can’t be in your life. You just can’t have that inside of your life.’ ” “Is God Is,” Harris added, was her way of working out what it meant to be the child that she was.
If Harris had to face some hard truths early on, there was also the refuge of her imagination. “Doll play was very serious for me as a child,” she said. “It was like I had a full story with characters. I think I just started out with a strong impulse to put a story where there hadn’t been one before.” After graduating from high school, in Biloxi, Mississippi, Harris studied visual art for two years at a community college; her plan was to go into graphic design, because it was a marketable skill. But then she transferred to the University of Southern Mississippi, and it occurred to her that she’d rather go broke doing the thing she loved, so she switched to the theatre department. The Black drama she was exposed to there was primarily the work of August Wilson, which drew on a more conventional style of conflict and resolution than Harris was looking for in her work. She wrote her first play out of frustration. “It was called ‘Our Fathers,’ ” she said. “It was this monologue, these five women talking back to their dads, essentially.”
After graduating, Harris got a job as an actor with the Eckerd Theatre Company, a children’s-theatre group, in Florida. “I was really hungry for performance, for being able to create a performance that I was excited by,” she said. She began hitting open-mike nights in the Tampa Bay area’s spoken-word scene. This, she said, taught her about the “rhythm of language” and “intentionality.” Thus galvanized, Harris and two female friends co-founded a theatre company called Blue Scarf Collective, where they mounted their own plays.
By 2010, Harris felt “grown” enough to apply to CalArts, in Southern California, where she studied writing for performance. There, her gifts were apparent to the visual poet Doug Kearney and others, who encouraged her to tell stories in her own way. Harris was dogged about submitting her work to places that might support it, and in 2016 she was awarded the American Playwriting Foundation’s appropriately titled Relentless Award, for “Is God Is.” Created in honor of the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, the award came with a cash stipend that allowed Harris to spend more time writing and less time figuring out how to support her writing. She was late to class that day because she was on the phone with her mother, crying. After that, things happened quickly. More honors, and, eventually, a production of the astonishing “What to Send Up When It Goes Down” (2018). Like all of Harris’s plays, it has little in common stylistically with her other works. Each play, as Harris sees it, grows out of a different self. The Aleshea she was yesterday is not the Aleshea she dreams about being tomorrow.
Over breakfast, Harris told me that she had been working on “What to Send Up” before “Is God Is,” but the latter was finished first. In “What to Send Up,” subtitled “A play. A pageant. A ritual. A home-going celebration,” Harris depicts the Black village, but it’s a village of the dead. When I arrived at A.R.T./New York Theatres to see the 2018 staging of the play, the theatre’s lobby was wallpapered with Black and brown faces, and in the gallery I noticed a photograph of someone I had met a few times in the early eighties, the artist Michael Stewart, who died in 1983, after an encounter with transit cops, who accused him of graffitiing. Over and over again: the wronged dead, and the wrongdoers celebrating their acquittal. To see Stewart’s face—fixed in time, so young, so young—only added to the haunting power of the play, which honors the Black dead by making a safe space for the Black living. Entering the theatre, audience members were offered a black ribbon. The characters onstage (most of whom were identified by numbers, rather than by names) spoke to us from the depths of the love with which Harris infuses her plays:
I kept stepping forward. Harris had created an event at which grief was a bridge to the past—to the Black men and women killed—and to the potential future: more deaths. The actors performed scenes in which white liberalism became a kind of slime, shoved down the throats of Black people who did not speak so much as enact that liberal consciousness’s ideas about race, roles that only reinforced whiteness, violence upon violence. Experiencing pain, or recalling it, was essential to being emotionally in the piece; as in life, you could exorcise the damage only by confronting it.
“I wanted to do something that was activated, something an audience couldn’t just passively experience,” Harris told the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in a 2019 interview for American Theatre. “I also wanted to be really clear about rage, because rage and anger are central to a lot of my work. This has to do with the cultural pressure for me not to be angry, or the ways that, since I was a little girl, I received a message that anger wasn’t something that I could hold on to.” With “On Sugarland,” Harris has taken the anger she’s held on to and married it to her critical insight into how people respond to hope and trust, and how little they can handle any of it. It was Sophocles who helped point Harris toward the succulent despair of “On Sugarland,” but the pathos at the heart of the story had been in her since she was the young child of a soldier who could be deployed at any moment, ever aware that the winds of war could blow all love away. ♦
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