Is God Is / What to Send Up When It Goes Down - by Aleshea Harris (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Aleshea Harris turns theater into a monument, ephemeral but real, to ongoing pain. You can't tear down a statue that never shows up outside.--Vinson Cunningham, New Yorker

This volume includes two dynamic plays from Aleshea Harris that confront the experience of being Black in America.

An explosive epic that examines the cyclical nature of violence, Is God Is follows twin sisters who undertake a dangerous journey to exact revenge upon their father at the behest of their dying mother.

What to Send Up When It Goes Down is a play-pageant-ritual response to anti-Blackness in America. It is a challenge to us all: to heal through expression, expulsion, and movement.

Review Quotes

Is God Is

Furious and incandescent...Harris writes so blisteringly that the actors could just let the language's flames carry them along.
--Helen Shaw, Time Out New York

A rich, funny, unnerving, exhilarating gold mine.
--Sara Holden, New York Magazine

A snarly new master of high-octane carnage has risen into view. And she--yes, she--is putting her own audacious stamp on that most venerable of pop genres...Is God Is sees fit to bring down the house.
--Ben Brantley, New York Times

[An] excellent revenge fantasy...furious and incandescent.
--Helen Shaw, Time Out New York

What to Send Up When It Goes Down

If What to Send Up... is a receptacle for the rage that is part and parcel of life for many African-Americans, a piece that encourages its audience to respond with cathartic yells and tears, it is also shaped by a rarefied theatrical intelligence. You may not be entirely aware of its artistry until after it's over, or realize that the show you've seen is also a very good play.
--Ben Brantley, New York Times

What to Send Up... is not derivative, but it is a worthy inheritor of a couple of different strands of socially-critical theater. This is theater that sets out to do something: be that heal, expose, purge, condemn, motivate, or all of the above.
--Alison Walls, Exeunt Magazine

Harris had taken her artistic forebear's Ntozake Shange's loose-woven theatrical fabric and stretched into something tighter and crisper, capable of resounding like a struck drumhead.
--Helen Shaw, Time Out New York

About the Author

Aleshea Harris is an American playwright, spoken word artist, author, educator, actor, performer and screenwriter. Her work has been presented many places, including the Costume Shop at American Conservatory Theater, Playfest at Orlando Shakespeare Theater, VOXfest at Dartmouth, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Theatre @ Boston Court, L'École de la Comédie de Saint-Étienne, National Drama Center in France. Harris's awards include the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the Steinberg Playwright Award, the Helen Merrill Award for Playwrighting, the Hermitage Greenfield Prize, and The Horton Foote Prize.