In a cozy, colorfully decorated room outside the small performance space where The Movement Theatre Company is staging What to Send Up When It Goes Down, photos hang showing the faces of black men, women and children, many of them smiling. Read the names attached, though, and eventually you will find a familiar one that will send an instant chill down your spine. The pictures, a screen message at the center of an accompanying multi-media exhibit confirms, show more than 200 people “whose lives were brutally cut short due to racialized violence.”
Thus begins what is described in What to Send Up’s text as “A play. A pageant. A ritual. A homecoming celebration” The starting point is as simple as it is bleak: “Black people in America are more than twice as likely to be killed by police as people.” The playwright is Aleshea Harris, whose Is God Is, a tragicomic account of African-American sisters tasked by their mother with avenging their father, was one of last season’s most exciting and darkly thrilling new works. While What to Send Up affirms Harris’s gifts as a storyteller and weaver of words, it is, as you’d expect, markedly different in structure and intent, packing the kind of emotional wallop that only the truth can deliver.
There is no fourth wall to tear down here. The radiant young actress Naomi Lorrain, one of eight company members who alternately address us as themselves and appear as characters, meets audience members as they’re still taking in those photos to launch the first section of What to Send Up, which will involve their participation. “Let me be clear,” Lorrain told the multi-racial crowd at the preview I attended last week. “This ritual is first and foremost for black people.” Others were welcome, though, if “prepared to honor that through your respectful, conscientious presence.”
The exercise that followed, led by an elegant and gracious Kambi Gathesha, was, without giving too much away, hardly exclusionary. To the contrary, Harris and director Whitney White use this segment to create an environment of mutual respect (and comfort, for those who dread being acknowledged in a crowd) in which our common humanity is emphasized, even as the endless cycle and gruesome toll of racism are relayed to us. Gathesha’s fellow performers blend in to underscore the element of a shared experience; you may even mistake them for other attendees at first.
The cast members distinguish themselves, fast, as the workshop segues into a more character-driven portion, while keeping the play’s focus on historical and day-to-day atrocities. The subtle transition is achieved partly through music, the sole instruments being the actors’ voices and bodies. Denise Manning’s supple singing is a recurring feature, lending grace and suggesting at least the possibility of transcendence; chanting, breathing and coordinated movement are used throughout.
The writing itself is richly musical; the stark poetry and driving rhythms Harris mines in language, enhanced by repetition, lend power to What to Send Up from the beginning, making the grim statistics cited in the first part even more of a gut punch than they would be otherwise. A few of the roles juggled by the performers —who also include Alana Raquel Bowers, Rachel Christopher, Ugo Chukwu, Javon Q. Minter and Beau Thom, all of whom deliver muscular, vital performances—nod back to archetypes from the Antebellum South, acknowledged in a scenario that recalls the mix of broad comedy and violence in Is God Is.
But most of the characters are recognizably modern and less specific in design, functioning more to represent the dilemmas faced by today’s African-Americans, and the legacy that connects their enslaved ancestors to the victims commemorated outside the performance space. “It happened yesterday and it will happen tomorrow,” one refrain reminds us. Vignettes are repeated, moving faster and with a greater sense of desperation and dread; the actors move restlessly about Yu Hsuan Chen’s empty, grey set, dominated by a white chalk circle—a tip of the hat to Brecht—that is ominously retraced and strewn with confetti.
As the text points out, though, What to Send Up is also, and ultimately, celebratory—and cathartic, even if you don’t belong to its intended primary audience (though perhaps more so if you do). Music and movement are again integral in an uplifting sequence that follows the show’s dark climax, as is silence. Sometimes words can’t sufficiently express suffering, or injustice, but Harris’s—in conjunction with the other elements that inform this unique and haunting experience—continue to serve her well.
