Is God Is / What to Send Up When It Goes Down

＂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 on Is God Is

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.

＂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 on What to Send Up...

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.

Aleshea Harris is a playwright, performer and educator who received an MFA in Writing for Performance from California Institute of the Arts. 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 and in the 2015 anthology, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop.

Harris has been commissioned by American Conservatory Theater (Crack.Rumble.Fly., 2016) and CalArts’ Center for New Performance/La Comedie de Saint-Etiénne (The Gap, ongoing).

Aleshea is a MacDowell Fellow, Hedgebrook Alum and winner of the American Playwriting Foundation’s 2016 Relentless Award in honor of Philip Seymour Hoffman for her play Is God Is.