70 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022
stop? What happened to the Black vil-
lage where everyone looked out for ev-
eryone’s children?
H
arris’s mother, a twenty-year vet-
eran of the Army, raised Aleshea
and her two brothers primarily on her
own; Harris has no memory of her fa-
ther 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 se-
rious 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, Har-
ris 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 trans-
ferred 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 the-
atre 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 mono-
logue, these five women talking back to
their dads, essentially.”
After graduating, Harris got a job as
an actor with the Eckerd Theatre Com-
pany, a children’s-theatre group, in Flor-
ida. “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 gal-
vanized, 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 Cali-
fornia, where she studied writing for
performance. There, her gifts were ap-
parent 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 Relent-
less 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 figur-
ing out how to support her writing. She
was late to class that day because she
was on the phone with her mother, cry-
ing. After that, things happened quickly.
More honors, and, eventually, a produc-
tion of the astonishing “What to Send
Up When It Goes Down” (2018). Like
all of Harris’s plays, it has little in com-
mon 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 no-
ticed 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 num-
bers, rather than by names) spoke to us
from the depths of the love with which
Harris infuses her plays:
Welcome everyone. The black ribbon sym-
bolizes our grief. If you’d like a ribbon, please
take one, put it on and get into a circle....
Thank you for joining us. What we are about
to carry out is a ritual honoring those lost to
racist violence. If at any point during this rit-
ual you find you don’t wish to do something
that’s been asked of you, please just step out
of the circle.... Now, let’s talk about physi-
cal safety. Has anyone here ever seen someone
physically threatened or assaulted and feel that
it was because they were Black? If so, step for-
ward. If you’ve been physically threatened or
assaulted and you believe it was because you
are Black, step forward.
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 poten-
tial future: more deaths. The actors per-
formed scenes in which white liberal-
ism became a kind of slime, shoved down
the throats of Black people who did not
speak so much as enact that liberal con-
sciousness’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 pres-
sure 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 Sug-
arland,” Harris has taken the anger she’s
held on to and married it to her criti-
cal 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 succu-
lent 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.
