If a trend has emerged in Aleshea Harris’ first three off-Broadway plays, it’s that there is no trend. The Obie-winning Is God Is—her breakout piece—followed two twin sisters on a blood-soaked revenge spree (think murder by rock in a sock). Her follow-up, What to Send Up When It Goes Down, was a ritual created expressly for Black audiences. And her newest, On Sugarland, now at New York Theatre Workshop, can only be described as an epic: a powerful, poetic riff on Sophocles’ Philoctetes that uses a nondescript, mobile home–lined cul-de-sac to illustrate the ravages of war.
Saul (Billy Eugene Jones) is the stand-in for Sophocles’ soldier hero—the veteran whose foot “weeps and weeps and weeps like all news is bad/ Like all the babies is born dead”—but the women of Sugarland are the ones on whom The War truly takes a toll. (Harris just calls it “The War”; no specifics are given, other than that it’s happening somewhere and it’s deadly.) Tisha (Lizan Mitchell) tends to the dead—literally—in a makeshift graveyard built on memories and mementos. Odella (Adeola Role) has buried her beloved Freddy, whom she still mourns, and now she must bury her sister. Fourteen-year-old Sadie (the staggeringly good KiKi Layne) has lost her mother, and won’t say a word to anyone. Evelyn (Stephanie Berry) manages to put on her best dress for every funeral—or any occasion, for that matter—but she’s over all the violence. “F**k The War,” she tells Tisha. “The War can kiss my ass if it can find it through this glorious dress.”
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Sadie, as she explains, “can make the dead walk.” She doesn’t speak to other characters, but, luckily, she talks to the audience—elaborate, entrancing monologues that detail the lives and deaths of her extraordinary female ancestors. Her Great Great Great Gran disemboweled a soldier who was threatening her and shot the men who were violating her little sister (“It was a goddamn beautiful massacre,” says Sadie). Her Great Great Gran took revenge on a man who grabbed her behind during a game of darts by putting a dart “right in his heart”: “And she walks her fine self into the sunset.” Her Great Granny—a follies girl in a time when “dark girls who big and big girls who dark ain’t sposed to do/ nothing but cook and make babies and be loud or something—/ that’s what some folks think/ you know”—high-kicked a heckler into oblivion. And Grandma Lacy gave her daddy’s murderers the life sentence they deserved via a well-timed falling cinder block: “and the truck goes off the side of the road/ and rolls one, two, three times and catches fire/ and time it stops/ there ain’t nothin inside but roast white meat, ya feel me?” We could listen to these stories all night.
On Sugarland feels both overstuffed and underwritten. When Saul starts in about returning to the front lines—“A warrior gotta serve”—and when his “special” son Addis (Caleb Eberhardt) goes on and on about his role in Junior Cadets and training to follow in his father’s footsteps, it grows tiresome. We want to see more of Evelyn, who wears a ballgown and crown—excuse me, tiara—to funerals. Spend more time with the self-deprecating Odella: “If Odella wasn’t kinda pretty she’d be the town drunk,” she says with a smile. Hear more of Evelyn’s sage advice to Sadie: “Love this living. Mm hmm,” she tells the teenager. “Love it in your fingernails and to the edges of your hair follicles. Motherf**kers hate that.”
After more than two and a half hours, it feels greedy to ask for more time with these characters, but Harris has created such dynamic, vibrant women. It’s hard to leave them in Sugarland.
On Sugarland opened March 3, 2022, at New York Theatre Workshop and runs through March 20. Tickets and information: nytw.org
