THE HANGOVER REPORT – Aleshea Harris’s electrifying revenge play IS GOD IS at Soho Rep has room for both street grit and mythic expansiveness

Alfie Fuller and Dame-Jasmine Hughes in Aleshea Harris's "Is God Is" at Soho Rep.

Alfie Fuller and Dame-Jasmine Hughes in Aleshea Harris’s “Is God Is” at Soho Rep.

Yesterday, I caught Aleshea Harris’s electrifying spin on the American Western, Is God Is. The play is essentially a revenge story about a pair of African American twins who set out to wreak havoc on the man – their father – who caused them and their mother unspeakable pain and trauma. I found Ms. Harris’s play to be an intoxicating mix of gritty street culture and mythic timelessness, conciseness (the show runs a fast and furious 90 minutes) and desolate expansiveness. The piece pays reverential homage to the pop culture that yielded it (Spaghetti Westerns, Quentin Tarantino, Susan-Lori Parks, to name a few) and concurrently creates something new and authentic in the process.

Director Taibi Magar’s stylized, in-your-face production for Soho Rep. suits Ms. Harris’s concentrated, combustible text perfectly. The staging continues the theater company’s – which makes a welcome return to the nearly claustrophobic confines of the Walkerspace – tradition of highly theatrical, inventively conceptual use of its intimate home. Like Sarah Benson’s memorable production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon, this production features several visual and transitional coups that will take your breath away.

The cast is ferociously good. As the central twins Anaia and Racine, Alfie Fuller and Dame-Jasmine Hughes  are giving fearless, high-octane performances that I’ll not soon forget. The rest of the cast – comprised of Teagle F. Bougere, Anthony Cason, Nehassaiu deGannes, Jessica Frances Dukes, Caleb Eberhardt, Michael Gene – is equally good. Is God Is, with its bold aesthetics and meticulous execution, confirms Soho Rep’s essential role in the Off-Broadway landscape. It also harkens, in Aleshea Harris and Taibi Magar, the auspicious arrival of a pair of theater-makers who, like the play’s central pair,  are to be reckoned with.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

 

IS GOD IS
Off-Broadway, Play
Soho Rep.
1 hour, 30 minutes (without an intermission)
Through March 31

Categories: Off-Broadway, Theater

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