When the playwright and now film director Aleshea Harris began writing the script for “Is God Is,” she was on food stamps; subletting an apartment in North Hollywood; and working multiple jobs, including teaching at California Institute of Arts where she’d gotten her MFA in 2014 and moonlighting as an associate at David’s Bridal. “I was so broke,” Harris, now 44, said in a recent video interview with IndieWire.
As a break from the drudgery of surviving a fraught postgraduate landscape, Harris sought refuge in her imagination. “I wondered what would happen if I were to write a play that was inspired by ancient Greek tragedy, but populated by people who look and speak like myself,” she recalls thinking at the time. Inspired by a former professor with whom she studied these Hellenic texts, Harris started writing a surrealist narrative about fraternal twin sisters seeking vengeance on behalf of their mother, from whom they have been estranged. “Is God Is” premiered at Soho Rep Theatre New York in 2018 and garnered Harris three Obie Awards. Now, she’s turned the play into a movie.
Harris, who was born in Germany, raised in the U.S. South, and now lives in Pasadena, didn’t set out to be a film director until she linked with her producers — Riva Marker at Linden Entertainment, Tessa Thompson at Viva Maude, and Janicza Bravo at CYRK. “It was actually Jeremy O. Harris and Janicza, who are friends, who told me separately that they each thought that I should direct the movie,” Harris said. After Janicza offered her mentorship, the playwright agreed to take on the task. In many ways being a director made sense to Harris, for she had always felt protective of her plays and possessed, in her words, strong opinions about how they should be staged.
Still, a film set differs from a theater production, so Harris dove into studying how to most effectively translate her vision for the screen. The biggest lesson she learned was to “let the image breathe” and while that approach required her to rethink elements of “Is God Is,” it also invited new forms of engagement — particularly with the protagonists Racine and Anaia, played by Kara Young and Mallori Johnson, respectively. Through writing the screenplay and collaborating with Young and Johnson, Harris was able to flesh out these characters in a way that heightened the tragic undertones of their story.
“Is God Is” opens with a serene sepia snapshot of two little Black girls sitting on a bench, their backs facing the camera. After a young Black boy calls them ugly because of their badly burned skin, one of the girls beats him up with a bat. Harris spares audiences the bloody image, but the sound of the boy’s imploring shrieks is nevertheless haunting. Fast forward decades and those two girls are now young women who have been summoned by their mother, from whom they are estranged. God, as they call their matriarch, played by Vivica A. Fox, is dying, and before she takes her last breath, she wants her daughters to kill their father. Years ago, he lit God on fire and Racine and Anaia got burned too. A trial followed, the Man was set free, God was left badly wounded and the girls, permanently bearing the marks of this violence, were put in foster care.
Rage and resentment percolate beneath the surface of “Is God Is,” a film inspired by spaghetti Westerns, Southern Gothic traditions and Greek tragedy. Racine (eagerly) and Anaia (more reluctant) agree to God’s demands and journey to find the Man who tried to kill them. The film lives in a mythic register and takes place in a heightened version of our world. During her research phase, Harris looked to Ethan and Joel Coen’s “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” a satirical drama loosely based on Homer’s “Odyssey,” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” series. “I was trying to find a way to be absurd, and ridiculous,” Harris said, while maintaining the narrative’s “heart and actual stakes.”
And Harris succeeds. “Is God Is” achieves a tonal ambiguity that enhances Racine and Anaia’s journey through the director’s conjured Southern landscape. After leaving God’s house, the twins head to the office of the lawyer who defended the Man, as their father comes to be known, at the trial. Their interaction is at once gruesome and farcical: The lawyer has no tongue because the Man cut it off, for fear the attorney might one day become a rat. This scene is succeeded by an even more absurdist moment in which Racine and Anaia visit a sanctified church led by a woman named Divine (a scene-stealing Erika Alexandra). The Man and Divine were once married; he eventually absconded but not before leaving an heir (Josiah Cross). Naturally, Divine does not believe that The Man would abandon her; nor does she believe that the twins are telling the truth about his cruelty. Their inevitable confrontation leads to a minor chase through a desert-like tract of land.
Harris describes the texture and atmosphere of “Is God Is” as “three clicks to the left of center” — it’s her way of talking about the level of magic or nonrealist threads pulsing through the film. Researching the components that would form a coherent visual language was one of Harris’ favorite parts of the process. “I just got to nerd out,” she said. Her production designer Freyja Bardell and costume designer Angelina Vitto were her co-conspirators in figuring out how to make Racine and Anaia’s world feel uncanny. She returned to “O Brother, Where Art Thou” to better understand how the Coen brothers crafted their version of 1920s Mississippi Delta. She studied the color tone, costuming and music so she could crack the code. “I wasn’t doing exactly what they did,” she said, but “I was trying to take my cues from the ways they did it.”
Although “Is God Is” is Harris’ debut film, it’s not her first time thinking in these terms. Her work has always dealt in the otherworldly. Harris also wrote “On Sugarland,” a meditation on grief and PTSD loosely inspired by “Antigone” and “Philoctetes,” as well as Southern Gothic traditions and surrealism. (It was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.) Similar to “Is God Is,” “On Sugarland” roots itself in the perspective of a young Black woman searching for answers. The playwright prefers the mythic register when telling stories about Black women coming-of-age or finding themselves because she finds she can be more honest and access a different kind of truth. There are times when reality, as a Black woman living in the U.S., can be “maddening,” Harris says, and its grammar almost “immovable.” It’s no wonder that in “Is God Is” when Racine and Anais have forged their own language, one that the people in their fictive world can’t hear but audiences can see through on-screen subtitles. Working with the title designer Teddy Blanks, Harris found a textural font — one that embodied decaying paint and burns — to do the job.
Harris’ approach to storytelling — methodical, exacting and surreal — places her within a storied tradition. Her North Stars are Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison, two writers whose oeuvres forged new narrative possibilities. During our video call, Harris would frequently look just beyond the frame, where a poster of Butler hangs in her office. These women “set the standard of excellence,” she said, eyeing the poster. The rigor with which they approached their work is one Harris strives for in all of her projects. Not only does she feel empowered by their legacy, she also feels liberated by it.
An Amazon MGM release, “Is God Is” is now playing in theaters.
