IS GOD IS: An audacious act of creation splashed unapologetically across the stage

A 90-minute eruption of life force and narrative inevitability, Aleshea Harris’ Is God Is has manifested at Canadian Stage to blast away pandemic diffidence in a scorching act of stage-top immolation. In fact, so vital and volatile is this show that it took a collaboration among three theatre companies – Canadian Stage, Obsidian Theatre Company and Necessary Angel Theatre Company – to make it happen.

Is God Is is the tale of 21-year-old twin Black sisters Racine and Anaia, who are living in the northeast US. Racine has visible – and, we quickly learn, painful – burn scars on her arms, back and neck. Anaia has equally obvious and agonizing scars on her arms, face and neck. 

After receiving a surprise letter from the mother they long thought dead, they journey to “the Dirty South” to visit the wheezing “She” (the minimalist and mesmerizing Alison Sealy-Smith), who lies on her deathbed, covered in scars of her own. Racine calls her “God” –- because “She made us, didn’t she?” And “God” explains that it was their father who set the fire that burned them. She instructs the sisters to go west to The Valley to “make your Daddy dead.” 

So west they go: seeking answers and headed into the teeth of a reckoning. 

There will be humour. There will be pathos. There will be complex, recursive interplay among past, present and future. Among inheritance, destiny and freedom. And among abandonment, murder and justice.  

Oh, and there will be blood. Tarantino-level blood.  

Director Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu‘s production is a narrative freight train barrelling down a track of brief chapters (“Before God”, “In the Valley”) that flash up like movie subtitles. Ken Mackenzie’s set, Raha Javanfar’s lighting and Laura Warren’s projection fuse neon lighting, spectral imagery and titling with stage-wide gates that swing open and closed on new locations. 

This feels like a high-octane descent through the rings of a uniquely American hell.

For God resides in the “Dirty South”: in a city that is comically located in multiple southern states at the same time. So this tale is representative, rather than specific. At the same time, the situations trade on literary and filmic predecessors – biblical, mythical, tragic (Greek and Elizabethan) and spaghetti western. 

But the particular genius of these characters – and these performances – is that they refuse to be reduced to any of these precedents or stereotypes. When we first encounter a character – any character, major or minor – they literally narrate themself into existence. They describe their unique thoughts and actions using third-person description, as if referring to someone else. Whether hero, villain or victim, they write themselves into their role – before shifting to a more naturalistic first-person self.

The all-Black cast rises magnificently to the challenge of these on-stage acts of creation. Oyin Oladejo’s Racine, “the rough one who still got some pretty to her” is magnetically confident: a slow-talking, eye-flashing slinger of hard truths who grabs our focus as she moves lightning-fast between exposition, righteous anger and naked aggression. Vanessa Sears’s Anaia is a slower burn: tentative, plaintive, and questioning before the sisters’ odyssey begins to conflict, complicate and finally crystallize her. 

Tyrone Benskin’s Man (not “father” – and so even more starkly archetypal) appears late, striding slowly onto stage in a silent sequence that conjures the arrival of a Tarantino or classic western “Big Bad.”  Mercurial, he oscillates between loudly filling the stage and shrinking down to seeming human dimensions.  And the remaining cast members – Sabryn Rock’s Angie, Savion Roach’s Scotch, Micah Woods’ Riley and Matthew G Brown’s Chuck Hall – carve out memorable space between the frequent smallness of their motivations and the expansive burden of their social and archetypal backdrops.

Here are ugliness, absurdity and utter coherence powered by a western’s undertow of inevitability and its study of agency within that inevitability. The plot’s devastating circularity is foretold by the chiasmus that is the play’s title: a question and a statement which read the same backwards and forwards. 

Is God Is is an audacious act of creation splashed unapologetically across the stage. It grabs us, drags us unrelentingly to its close, then flings us, limp and breathless, back into the real world, to ponder what we’ve seen, what it’s told us about what it takes to break free . . . and why we enjoyed it so much. 

© Scott Sneddon, Sesayarts Magazine, 2022