Aleshea Harris’s New Play, On Sugarland, Is Poised to Shake Up New York Theater

Slim, with long, braided hair and sculpturally elegant features, Harris exudes an almost preternatural poise and watchfulness, leavened by a playful sense of humor. On a Zoom call, she apologizes for the messy state of her apartment in Los Angeles, though it strikes me as how my place looks after a cleaning binge. It seems appropriate for a former child of the military, whose mother, after emigrating from Trinidad and Tobago, enlisted in the U.S. Army and made it a 20-year career, taking her family from Germany, where Harris was born, to various posts throughout the American South, ending up in Biloxi, Mississippi. At college, Harris pursued acting—she played Sally Bowles in an undergraduate production of Cabaret, and there are pictures online to prove it—but, she says, “I was very consciously aware of the narrow perceptions of how Black women could exist onstage. And I remember starting to take playwriting seriously and writing my first real play then, because I wanted to see something different, and I started to feel like maybe I could be the one to make that something different. My question became: As a young Black woman, who has felt often when she goes to the theater like she’s eavesdropping on a conversation that has nothing to do with her, how do I make the conversation all about women like me?”

With On Sugarland, Harris, who honed her craft as both a grad student and teacher at CalArts, returns to the life she knew growing up on military bases, with its insularity and almost religious sense of ritual—she remembers having to stop whatever she was doing to salute the flag during bugle call every evening. Riffing on Sophocles’ Philoctetes—the story of a wounded warrior, exiled because of the foul smell of his injured foot, who is cajoled into using his prowess as an archer to fight for Greece in the Trojan War—Harris offers a blisteringly angry, deeply tragic, and raucously funny look at a community in the South that turns to an all-powerful military as a way out of the cul-de-sac on which its members live. Harris wrote the play, she says, in part to try to understand her mother’s unwavering devotion to the military and also to examine what it means to fight and die for a country where Black veterans return home to face white violence. She cites World War I veteran Charles Lewis, who, in 1918, was lynched in uniform. But, as is Harris’s way, she mixes elements of melodrama, thriller, Southern Gothic, and magical realism, using the story as a framework to explore, among other things, family, community, collective memory, intergenerational trauma, and the brutal—sometimes liberating—effect of violence. “I want to make sure people understand that this isn’t a heavy, joyless, downtrodden mama-on-the-porch-weeping-and-wailing play,” she says. “It feels very vibrant to me, very light on its feet. It’s about people who are moving forward despite the difficulty of their circumstances—​everybody’s after something. That doesn’t mean folks don’t get sad or need a moment to mourn. But it’s not about sitting still or standing around in a bucket of tears.”

The vividly etched characters who live on the Sugarland cul-de-sac include the charismatic but tortured ex-soldier Saul, his developmentally disabled son, Addis, who dreams of military glory, and the wryly funny Tisha and grandiloquent Evelyn, who, despite their constant bickering, are united in their mournful knowledge of war’s terrible human cost. But the most indelible of Sugarland’s residents are its young, who embody both the fragility and the ebullience of youth. If the play has a central figure, it is Sadie, a seemingly delicate but secretly powerful preadolescent girl. Sadie speaks only in a series of extraordinary monologues to the audience, in which she lets us know that she can make the dead walk as she summons tall tales about the prowess of her female ancestors and tries to connect with her mother, who was killed in the perpetual war that broods over the play. In an electric and beautifully wrought opening speech, Sadie tells a story that seems to be headed toward a recollection of rape and turns into a knife-plunging, guns-blazing, gleefully blood-spattered triumph of Tarantino-​esque retribution. “The term I’ve come up with for my work is deranged frivolity,” Harris says with a laugh. “I obviously don’t think anyone should go out and gut someone, but I hope that it challenges the mythology, with a narrative that says: This Black child, who you were going to assault, is actually someone you should not fuck with. My goal as a writer is always to remind Black girls and women: You are worthy, you are amazing, you are worth fighting for, and it’s fine for you to fight for yourself. And 
your anger is righteous.”

In a nod to the play’s Attic roots, Harris has also created The Rowdy, a kind of Greek chorus of boisterous young folk weaving throughout the proceedings, inspired by a jukebox-challenge video that she saw on YouTube. As the play’s director, White auditioned dozens of young performers to find just the right mix. “The Rowdy is the dopest kind of incarnation of a theatrical ensemble I have ever seen in my life,” she says. “They are loud, they are rambling, they’re undeniable, they’re part of the community. Most of all, they’re a representation of our young that we are constantly losing. And I think we’ve put together the most insatiable, vivacious, beautiful group of young Black beings you could possibly imagine.”

As White notes, Harris is nothing if not rigorous as a writer. But she is also bursting with so much theatrical invention that it borders on the profligate. She often describes her plays as stews with a wide variety of ingredients cooked together. For On Sugarland, she turns to another culinary metaphor. “It’s like a really dense cake, and there are all these layers,” she says. “Some people will get just the icing and maybe a little bit of the upper crust—Okay, this is a play about a cul-de-sac and a bunch of people who disagree a lot—and that’s cool. Others will get and appreciate the deeper layers and more subtle flavors—Ooh, are we talking misogynoir? And the reason that it’s constructed as such is because I want to say a lot of things. I’m after a lot. I’m a greedy woman.” 

In this story: hair, Eric Williams; makeup, Kiki Gifford.