They are curious furies, the two women who stand before us at the start of Aleshea Harris’s electrifying new play, Is God Is, now running at Soho Rep. Twin sisters Racine and Anaia are young and black and would be beautiful were it not for the hideous scars they bear, souvenirs from a long-ago house fire. In Anaia’s case, they cover her face, making it “look like it melted and then froze,” she muses. “’Naia is trapped in a prison of sweetness,” she adds, referring to herself, as Harris’s characters periodically will, in the third person. “Girl so ugly don’t get to be mean.”
“’Cine does though,” notes Racine, whose face, unlike her arms and back, was left unscathed. “She got both their mean.”
The ladies are about to be called on a “mission from God”—that is, their mother, whom they long believed had perished in that fire 18 years ago, when they were only three. She, as Mom is called in the play, is a wrathful deity, bent on vengeance; suddenly summoning her daughters to her bedside at the “Folsom Rest Home For the Weary,” She orders them to kill the man responsible for their plight: her long-estranged husband. “Make your daddy dead,” She demands, repeating the last word several times. “And everything around him you can destroy, too… And bring me back some treasures from it.”
Thus begins a journey unlike any you’re likely to have experienced within four walls lately, evocative of the films of Quentin Tarantino and the plays of Sam Shepard—as well as the classical tragedies, revenge plays and spaghetti westerns that preceded them—but relayed in a uniquely fierce, lyrical voice that happens to belong to an African-American woman. Racine and Anaia go west, to California, accompanied by strains of music suggesting Ennio Morricone’s scores for Sergio Leone (and later Tarantino), and hip-hop excerpts. A small TV crackles above stage right, displaying titles such as “The Weapon” and “In the Valley,” along with flames referencing the play’s original sin between bursts of static.
The destruction begins even before the sisters reach their destination, “The House on the Hill” where their father—Man, he’s called—resides with his current wife and the male twins she bore him, now approaching their late teens. Racine carries a “rock in a sock,” a nod to Cain and Abel, and there is plenty of carnage before the final reckoning, which pits Man directly against one daughter (you may not guess which) in a confrontation that, like much of the action here, will leave you perched on the edge of your seat, possibly squirming, and breathless.
There is, mercifully, a good deal of pitch-black humor along the way—it’s the absurdity and elusiveness of moral justice that give Is God Is its punch and its sting —as director Taibi Magar and her superb cast deftly juggle the bad, the sad and the ludicrous. Dame-Jasmine Hughes’s bracing Racine could be the sassier cousin of Uma Thurman’s Kill Bill character, while Alfie Fuller brings a soulful ache and then defiant force to the part of Anaia. Jessica Frances Dukes’s ferocious, hilarious She remains, fittingly, something of a mystery, up to her unsettling final scene with one daughter.
Nahassaiu deGannes lends more tightly wound drollness as Man’s spouse of the moment, Angie, who is unexpectedly elegant, neurotic, clueless and, of course, doomed. (Angie’s talky asides present a stark contrast to the other women’s dialogue, showing Harris’s gift for reinforcing character and background through language.) Their sons are an obnoxious aspiring rap poet, comically played by Caleb Eberhardt, and a rather gentler soul (Anthony Cason, a delicate foil) who seems to start bonding with Anaia before all hell breaks loose, again. Teagle F. Bougere’s icy, fearsome Man makes a blood-curdling entrance that involves a cowboy hat and a prolonged silence, and his malevolent presence lingers long after the curtain falls.
Harris’s bio in the program informs us that she is now working on “an adaptive response to Socrates’s Philoctetes” (commissioned by the Denver Center Theatre), as well as a solo play for her own performance. With Is God Is—as dense, chilling and thrilling a work as New York has seen from a young playwright in quite some time—there should be plenty of excitement for those projects, and all that will follow.
Is God Is opened February 8 at Soho Rep and plays through March 31. Information and tickets: sohorep.org.
