THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022 67
ckness onstage,” Harris says.
ACRITICAT LARGE
SPIRIT HOUSE
Aleshea Harris’s Black village onstage.BY HILTONALSPHOTOGRAPH BY HEATHER STEN
“
I
’m just trying to get authenti-
cally to that,” the actress Steph-
anie Berry told her director,
Whitney White, as they stood in a spa-
cious rehearsal room in the East Vil-
lage in mid-January. They were work-
ing 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 Sugar-
land” was inspired by “Philoctetes,”
Sophocles’ play about an expert archer
plagued by chronic pain and exiled be-
cause 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 Har-
ris’s new play, which is itself about my-
thology: one myth being that, by serv-
ing your country, you are protecting
your community and yourself; another
being that love can vanquish pain.
“On Sugarland” is sour with heart-
ache 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 noth-
ing 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 afemale 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 ex-
pands on the overriding theme in Har-
ris’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 patriar-
chal disregard. Just as Tennessee Wil-
liams 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 Ber-
tolt 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 in-
habited by male distance or neglect.
Some of Harris’s strongest charac-
ters, 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 dress-
ing that self up and flaunting it, un-
like her straitlaced sister, Tish, who
just wants to fit in. (Evelyn is a won-
derful, smart presence, part philo-
sopher, part town critic, and part an-
archic Sula.) She’s through with
menstruation, she says, but she does