“Is God Is” is heading to the big screen. Aleshea Harris will adapt her award-winning play about twin sisters on the revenge trail for Scott Rudin and A24, Broadway World reports.
Following twin sisters as they travel from the South to the California desert, Harris’ play sees the siblings trying to find and kill their father “at the request of their ailing mother, who is God,” the source details.
The play won four Obie awards, including best play and best director.
“I was really interested in writing a revenge tale,” Harris has explained. “I love revenge narratives. I wanted to write one that featured black women who spoke in a particular way — the way that I spoke and sometimes speak being someone who grew up mostly in the south — and wanted to be unapologetic and no holds barred in their manner of expression. I just wanted to tell this story.” She continued, “One of my prompts to myself was, if I were to write an ancient Greek tragedy, taking cues from that form, what could that look like? What would the family look like? How would I populate the landscape, etcetera etcetera? I have been interested in westerns for a while. I just went for it and did a mashup, and had lots of fun writing a crazy play for myself first, the kind of play that I would want to read.”
“I thought very specifically about how black women and anger had been portrayed, how black women and revenge had been portrayed — or, I should say, not portrayed — and about what I feel like is a cultural expectation that black women gain their strength through endurance, through not being an eye for an eye, through not returning violence for violence, through being survivors,” Harris said. “That’s a narrative that’s really familiar. I wanted to challenge that narrative. I wanted to tell a story of black women who had been abused and sought justice for themselves and each other.”
Harris’ work has been presented at the Costume Shop at American Conservatory Theater, Playfest at Orlando Shakespeare Theater, VOXfest at Dartmouth, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, among other fests and theaters. Her latest offering, “What to Send Up When It Goes Down,” is slated to premiere in the fall at the Movement Theater Co.
