Asro
In the landscape of modern American storytelling, few transitions are as compelling as the one navigated by playwright and director Aleshea Harris. Once a struggling artist in North Hollywood—subletting a cramped apartment while balancing shifts at David’s Bridal and teaching at the California Institute of the Arts—Harris has transformed her personal crucible of scarcity into a cinematic powerhouse. Her debut feature film, Is God Is, which hit theaters this week via Amazon MGM, stands as a testament to the power of surrealism as a tool for survival.
At 44, Harris has emerged as a singular voice in contemporary drama. Her journey from the austerity of a postgraduate existence to the director’s chair is not merely a tale of professional ascension; it is a profound study in how the imagination can be leveraged to rewrite the trauma of the past.
The Genesis of a Myth: From Scarcity to Staging
The seeds of Is God Is were sown during a period of intense personal and financial instability. For Harris, the drudgery of survival—the reliance on food stamps and the grind of multiple jobs—served as a paradoxical catalyst for creativity.
"I was so broke," Harris admits, reflecting on the mid-2010s. Yet, in that void, she sought refuge in the ancient. Inspired by a former professor who introduced her to the rigor of Hellenic texts, Harris began to wonder: What would happen if she took the structural intensity of Greek tragedy and populated it with characters who shared her own vernacular, her own identity, and her own cadence?
The result was a surrealist narrative of vengeance featuring fraternal twin sisters—Racine and Anaia—bound by the trauma of their mother’s victimization. The play premiered at New York’s Soho Rep Theatre in 2018, where it was met with immediate acclaim, eventually garnering three Obie Awards. It was a rare instance of a contemporary play effectively bridging the gap between high-concept abstraction and visceral, ground-level emotional stakes.
Chronology of a Creative Leap
The trajectory of Is God Is follows a deliberate path of expansion, moving from the stage to the screen through a series of serendipitous professional alliances.
- 2014: Harris earns her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, beginning a period of teaching and financial struggle in North Hollywood.
- 2018: Is God Is premieres at Soho Rep, earning widespread critical praise and three Obie Awards.
- 2023: Harris’s play On Sugarland—a meditation on grief and PTSD—is named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, solidifying her status as a playwright of significant gravity.
- 2024–2025: Under the mentorship of producer Janicza Bravo and the guidance of partners like Riva Marker and Tessa Thompson, Harris begins the transition to film direction.
- 2026: The feature film adaptation of Is God Is is released globally by Amazon MGM.
The decision to transition to film was not one Harris made lightly. Initially, she did not view herself as a director. It took the persistence of peers like Jeremy O. Harris and Janicza Bravo to convince her that she was the only person who truly understood the "mythic register" of her own work.
"Janicza offered her mentorship," Harris recalls. "She helped me realize that being a director was essentially an extension of the protectiveness I already felt over my scripts."
The Mechanics of Adaptation: Letting the Image Breathe
Transitioning from the proscenium arch to the camera lens required a fundamental shift in philosophy. In the theater, the audience’s eye is guided by the stagecraft; in film, the camera dictates the reality.
Harris’s most significant takeaway during production was the necessity to "let the image breathe." This meant stripping away some of the theatrical artifice to allow the environment—the humid, ominous, and surreal landscape of the South—to tell its own story.
Translating the Surreal for the Screen
The film opens with a haunting, sepia-toned tableau: two young Black girls on a bench. Their lives are irrevocably altered when a young boy insults them for their burn scars, triggering a violent act of retribution. This opening sequence sets the tone for the rest of the film—a blend of Southern Gothic tradition, the satirical grit of the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and the stylized violence of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.
"I was trying to find a way to be absurd, and ridiculous," Harris explains, "while maintaining the narrative’s heart and actual stakes."
To achieve this "three clicks to the left of center" aesthetic, Harris collaborated closely with production designer Freyja Bardell and costume designer Angelina Vitto. Together, they curated a visual language that felt both period-accurate and uncanny—using color palettes and textures that echoed the decay and resilience of the protagonists.
Supporting Data: Character, Language, and the Mythic Register
The narrative arc of Is God Is centers on Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson), who are summoned by their estranged, dying mother, "God" (Vivica A. Fox). Their mission: to exact revenge on the father who attempted to murder them all years prior.
The Power of Subtitled Truths
One of the most striking elements of the film is its use of a unique, non-verbal language shared by the twins. For the audience, this language is rendered through on-screen subtitles designed by Teddy Blanks. The typography itself is a character, utilizing textures that suggest peeling paint and burn marks.
This creative choice speaks to a broader theme in Harris’s work: the struggle of the Black woman to be heard in a world that often ignores her. By creating a private language for her protagonists, Harris allows them a form of agency that is entirely their own, inaccessible to the men who once sought to destroy them.
Official Responses and Critical Reception
The film has been hailed as a landmark debut. Critics have noted that while the subject matter is heavy—dealing with trauma, disfigurement, and cyclical violence—Harris’s direction prevents the film from becoming a bleak exercise in misery. Instead, it functions as a dark, mythic fairy tale.
Producers Riva Marker, Tessa Thompson, and Janicza Bravo have lauded Harris’s "methodical, exacting" approach to the set. Her ability to translate the surrealism of her stage work into the grounded medium of film has been described as a "revelation" by those involved in the production.
Implications: A New Canon of Black Surrealism
Aleshea Harris is frequently compared to literary titans like Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison. Her office, adorned with a poster of Butler, serves as a sanctuary for her process. For Harris, these women represent the "standard of excellence"—a benchmark of rigor that she strives to match in every script and every frame.
The "Maddening" Reality
The implications of Harris’s work go beyond mere entertainment. She argues that for Black women living in the United States, reality can often feel "maddening" and its societal grammar "immovable." By turning to the mythic register, she isn’t escaping reality; she is confronting it with the only tools sharp enough to cut through the noise.
By framing her stories through the lens of Southern Gothic surrealism, Harris invites audiences to look at the past not as a closed chapter, but as a living, breathing, and often dangerous myth.
As Is God Is continues its theatrical run, the success of the project signals a shift in Hollywood. There is a growing appetite for stories that reject the traditional, linear approach to trauma, opting instead for the surreal, the bold, and the unapologetically mythic. Aleshea Harris has proven that when one stops waiting for permission to tell the truth, they can build an entire world—and in her case, a world that is as haunting as it is unforgettable.
Siti Muinah
Basiran
