“Did you remember to back up the last 4.5 billion years?”bleed—from her eyes, from her nip-
ples—which is what happens after she
runs into her younger neighbor Saul,
whom she is fond of. Evelyn is anti-
war, 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 char-
acter’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 stud-
ied 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 on-
stage unless the work is one of real-
ism,” Harris has written. “‘On Sugar-
land’ 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 metatheatrical-
ity.” 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 whis-
tling, 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 pro-
duction that’s not that. “I can’t! Every
show!” White said, laughing the lon-
gest of all. “Let ‘Dreamgirls’ rest.”“
I
think what I’m interested in is dis-
rupting these really narrow ideas
that people unfortunately still have
about Blackness onstage,” Harris told
me. It was a Sunday, a week and a halfafter the rehearsal, and we were hav-
ing 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 material-
ized 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 dan-
ger of becoming predictable, a palat-
able 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-min-
ute 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—an-
other presence. In the bathroom, She
found her children’s father standing
behind the shower curtain. He’d bro-
ken 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: