Dawn Lundy Martin

Aleshea Harris

Drama. Poetry. Performance Studies. African & African American Studies. California Interest. Hybrid Genre. Winner of the 2016 Relentless Award from the American Playwriting Foundation. Introduction by Dawn Lundy Martin. Aleshea Harris' IS GOD IS is a classic revenge tale about two sisters that blends tragedy, typography, the Spaghetti Western, hip-hop and Afropunk. In this necessary new play, emotions are laid bare through gaps in language and characters are a window into the canon as well as our own broken times. "A rigorous new work that unearths our deepest fears about humanity and who we think we are in relation to ourselves and the divine."—Dawn Lundy Martin "Family, as the old tragedians knew, is our first country. Therefore, it's the earth from which we forge our first weapons, the fields of our first wars, the very turf over which we fight. With IS GOD IS, Aleshea Harris audaciously scours tragedy down with the rough edge of a rock. To read this merciless play is to get blood in your eye—and in Harris' sure grip, you'll recall that blood washes and stains, can run hot or cold, means both violence and family."—Douglas Kearney 3 Hole Press is a small press bringing new audiences to new plays in printed formats. The Press publishes titles that expand notions of what a play is, the possibilities that emerge for drama on the page, and the connection between plays and other mediums. Interdisciplinary by design, these books belong outside the drama section.

A Play

Is God Is

An emerging writer presents two dynamic new plays that confront the experience of being black in America.

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.

As lines between characters and actors – as well as observers and observed – blur, a dizzying series of vignettes builds to a climactic moment in which performance and reality collide, highlighting the absurdity of anti-Blackness in our society. Through facilitation and dialogue we must decide how to cope, resist, and move forward.

Aleshea Harris

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