Aleshea Harris is an American playwright, spoken word artist, author, educator, actor, performer, and screenwriter. Her play Is God Is won the American Playwriting Foundation's Relentless Award in 2016. The award, issued to playwrights annually to honor Philip Seymour Hoffman, honored the play based on how it depicts a revenge story that draws from "the ancient, the modern, the tragic, the Spaghetti Western, hip-hop and Afropunk". The cash prize of $45,000 is the largest cash prize in American theatre given, and about 2,000 unproduced plays were submitted. Is God Is looks at deviant morality, familial dysfunction, being a black girl/woman, and patricide. The award gave Harris the opportunity to have stage readings in regional theaters across the country and abroad. Her work has been commissioned for the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Her plays have toured in France and in Belgium. Her works have been presented at Playfest at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice, California Institute of the Arts, VOXfest at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and the Comédie de Saint-Étienne-National Drama Center in France. Her work has appeared in the anthology The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, published in 2015. She is a CalArts alumna. She was a part of CalArts' student organization - a collective that collaborated with the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and with the African American Shakespeare Company, with three plays and two staged readings.
Early life
Harris says that she was an army child and she lived in many places. She lived mostly in the South.
Career
In 2018 Is God Is, written by Aleshea Harris and directed by Taibi Magar, opened at Soho Rep in New York City. Is God Is received 3 Obie Awards for Playwriting, Directing, and Performance. In 2017 she collaborated with The Movement Theatre Company with a reading of her play What to Send Up When It Goes Down. It is described as a play/pageant/ritual about the death of black people due to racial violence. In 2016 she shared her performance art piece What to Send Up When it Goes Down at Occidental College in Los Angeles. What to Send Up When it Goes Down incorporates song, language, and audience participation to honor black bodies and lives. In 2018, What to Send Up When It Goes Down was produced off-Broadway by The Movement Theatre Company in a Drama Desk-nominated, extended production. That production later traveled to the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington D.C., The PublicTheater in New York for the Under the Radar Festival, and will be produced at Playwrights Horizons in New York. In March 2020 Harris was awarded one of the eightWindham-Campbell Literature Prizes.
Quotes
"I noted that people seemed to have a very narrow view of what kind of space my body could occupy on stage — and I found that really frustrating. I decided to write plays." Regarding What to Send Up When It Goes Down: "It's a piece that is, ideally, a tool that communities can access when they're in crisis after someone has been killed. I feel very strongly that we need tools. Every oppressed population, every marginalized population needs tools for coping, and I hope that this can be one for black people."
