The Tamesis
God?Playwright Aleshea Harris tells an epic tale of family trauma and revenge that’s also a story of female power. It’s only fitting, then, that Harris adapts it himself.
“It was a baptism by fire,” the Pulitzer Prize finalist said of writing and directing the new film adaptation of the play, which opens on May 15 and which happens to begin and end with a fire.
Following twin sisters on a cross-country revenge mission, Harris’ play premiered Off-Broadway in 2018 to critical acclaim and multiple extensions. Harris had always planned to adapt the work into a screenplay, but it was only at the urging of friends and colleagues that she stepped behind the camera. “As a playwright, I have very strong ideas about how to perform, and that can be frustrating to some of the directors I work with,” Harris said. “It was really because of the women around me who believed in me that I was able to do this. When we pitched it to studios, it was already a package deal.”
Her off-screen support for women mirrors her on-screen relationships God?centers on sisters Racine, aka “Rough One” (played by Kara Young) and Anaya, aka “Quiet One” (Mallory Johnson). Scarred both physically and mentally by their father’s brutal attack, the sisters are unexpectedly summoned by their mother (Viveca A. Fox) to hear her dying plea: “Let your daddy die. Really die.”
This is a sudden, intergenerational trauma for women. Racine and Anaya grew up in foster care and thought they had no parents. But Ruby—or God, as Racine calls her—only protected her children from their father, who doused her in alcohol and set her on fire. (The girls’ scars are from trying to put out the flames.) God’s deathbed plea sets them on a road adventure of epic proportions as they find themselves battling patriarchy in one form or another. As Racine told Anaya, “This is some fate-type shit.”
While writing, Harris knew the sisters must be twins. “I think there’s an inherent drama to twins. There’s also something mysterious about twins. They feel a little magical and unusual.” During their long journey south – first by car, then bus, then a long walk – cracks in the sisters’ relationship began to show. Over the course of two long half-lives dependent on each other, they begin to express themselves as individuals on the road—an idea that Harris likes to explore visually.
