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

PRAISE FOR IS GOD IS

"Reinvents The Good, the Bad and the Ugly … Step aside, Quentin Tarantino and Martin McDonagh, and all you other macho purveyors of mutilation and mayhem with a smile. 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, the old-as-time tale in which getting even comes accessorized with flames, screams, and buckets of blood … A gratifying, lurid play."

—BEN BRANTLEY, NEW YORK TIMES

"According to the author, this epic ‘takes its cues from the ancient, the modern, the tragic, the Spaghetti Western, hip-hop, and Afropunk.’ There’s hints of The Oresteia in there, right alongside Kill Bill … Harris’s play is a rich, funny, unnerving, exhilarating gold mine."

—SARA HOLDREN, VULTURE

"Is God Is is a language play, in the best of ways … there is an intentional performativity that allows the language to exist parallel to, while still driving, the action. The words live in our brains, the action in our stomachs. They meet with every not-so-rhetorical gut-punch."

—DAN O’NEIL, EXEUNT NYC

PRAISE FOR WHAT TO SEND UP WHEN IT GOES DOWN

From the start, Harris makes clear that she wrote the play for Black people, and the audience participation is guaranteed to make some viewers uncomfortable. So be it: This is theater as art, exorcism, balm, and battle cry.

—ELISABETH VINCENTELLI, NEW YORKER

"What to Send Up When It Goes Down will rock you to your core. This electric, uncompromising, and powerfully moving work casts a light on racialized violence and its victims that is both searing and illuminating. Harris has created a play that leaps across categories, registering as part theater piece and part ritual of mourning, remembrance, and resolve."

—DON AUCOIN, BOSTON GLOBE

Go to this show. Go with an open mind and an open heart and quiet mouth and ego and be prepared to be granted a look into the reality of Black lives. It will make a difference in how you see.

—MARY ANN JOHNSON, MD THEATRE GUIDE

There are two concentric parts to Aleshea Harris’s part-ceremony, part-play … The center of the night is Harris’s vivid choreopoem, an intertwined series of short scenes that include song, dance, and absurdist microplays. It’s as though Harris had taken her artistic forebear’s Ntozake Shange’s loose-woven theatrical fabric and stretched it into something tighter and crisper, capable of resounding like a struck drumhead.

—HELEN SHAW, TIME OUT NEW YORK

"‘An anger spittoon.’ The phrase crackles with both a deep visceral charge and an elegant precision. These words are only three among many used by the playwright Aleshea Harris to characterize her truly sui generis, truly remarkable work, What to Send Up When It Goes Down … Ms. Harris has a gift for pushing the familiar to surreally logical extremes."

—BEN BRANTLEY, NEW YORK TIMES

"Is God Is, a tragicomic account of African-American sisters tasked by their mother with avenging their father, was one of last season’s most exciting and darkly thrilling new works. While What to Send Up affirms Harris’s gifts as a storyteller and weaver of words, it is, as you’d expect, markedly different in structure and intent, packing the kind of emotional wallop that only the truth can deliver."

—ELYSA GARDNER, NEW YORK STAGE REVIEW

"Even though the actors tell you that the rituals of What to Send Up When It Goes Down are primarily for Black audience members, people of any color can—yes, I think, must—relate to the anguish flowing through this intense and edifying experience."

—PETER MARKS, WASHINGTON POST

"In What to Send Up When It Goes Down, collective rage in response to racialized violence in America is welcomed like a new-born baby, a treasured expression of endearment and a truth that holds the key to empowerment … The ritual of release and healing in What to Send Up When It Goes Down is the first time I have ever been in a theatrical space that so directly confronts the deep emotions connected to racial victimization—and made it okay to completely express what you always wanted to say but couldn’t or wouldn’t. In What to Send Up When It Goes Down—you can. This feels both frightening and freeing at the same time. What a different feeling for theater. To immerse myself as a participant in the pain, violence, injustice, fear, anger, and disbelief in which so many victims have died at the hands of people who feared them enough to want to destroy them … Through a series of three parodied vignettes, What to Send Up When It Goes Down escalates in emotions that ascend to heights that honor those who have fallen victim to racialized violence, stirring up waves of fury that crest in overwhelming pain but fall upon calm shores that anchor the joy of overcoming."

—RAMONA HARPER, DC METRO THEATER ARTS

The play itself backs up the preamble and ritual with a fine mix of racially tinged, rotating character sketches, step routines, singalongs, and monologues performed by a uniformly excellent cast … Knowledge, compassion, and laughter flow through every scene … All the sharing and singing and shouting lead to well-earned catharsis.

—ANDRÉ HEREFORD, METRO WEEKLY

"There’s a lot to digest in the ninety minutes of What to Send Up and still more to unpack long after you leave. But that is precisely why the work excels."

—TAMARA BEST, DAILY BEAST

"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 NYC

"Aleshea Harris has not just written a performance in her production, What to Send Up When It Goes Down, she has created a space, a community ritual, and the opportunity for Black audience members to breathe."

—CELINA COLBY, BAY STATE BANNER

IS GOD IS

WHAT TO SEND UP

WHEN IT GOES DOWN

ALESHEA HARRIS

THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUPNEW YORK2021

Is God Is / What to Send Up When It Goes Down is copyright © 2021

by Aleshea Harris

Is God Is / What to Send Up When It Goes Down is published by

Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 Eighth Avenue, 24th Floor,

New York, NY 10018-4156

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that these plays are subject to payment of a royalty. The plays are fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth), and of all countries covered by the Pan-American Copyright Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention, the Berne Convention, and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including professional/amateur stage rights, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound recording, all other forms of mechanical, electronic or digital reproduction, transmission and distribution, such as CD, DVD, ebooks, the internet, private and file-sharing networks, information storage and retrieval systems, photocopying, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. Author’s representative: Derek Zasky, William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, 11 Madison Avenue, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10010, (212) 903-1396. All inquiries concerning English language stock and nonprofessional stage performing rights to Is God Is and What to Send Up When It Goes