Aleshea Harris

Last updated
Aleshea Harris
Aleshea Harris (Artist).jpg
Aleshea Harris, panelist for Theater Talks: Playwrights, at the Schomburg Library in Harlem, NYC, on January 22, 2018
OccupationPlaywright, writer, spoken word artist
LanguageEnglish
NationalityAmerican
Education University of Southern Mississippi (BA)
California Institute of the Arts (MFA)
GenreTheatre, drama
Website
www.bagofbeans.net

Aleshea Harris is an American playwright, spoken word artist, author, educator, actor, performer, and screenwriter. Her play Is God Is won the American Playwriting Foundation's Relentless Award in 2016.

Contents

Her work has been commissioned for the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] Her plays have toured in France and in Belgium and have been presented at Playfest at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice, California Institute of the Arts, VOXfest at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and the Comédie de Saint-Étienne-National Drama Center in France.

Early life

Harris says that she was an army child and she lived in many places, mostly in the South. [7]

Harris is a CalArts alumna. [8] She was a part of CalArts' student organization - a collective that collaborated with the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and with the African-American Shakespeare Company, with three plays and two staged readings. [9]

Career

Harris's work appeared in the anthology The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, published in 2015.

In 2016 she shared her performance art piece What to Send Up When it Goes Down at Occidental College in Los Angeles. What to Send Up When it Goes Down incorporates song, language (spoken word), and audience participation to honor black bodies and lives. [10] [11] It is described as a play/pageant/ritual about the death of black people due to racial violence. [12]

In 2017 she collaborated with The Movement Theatre Company with a reading of her play What to Send Up When It Goes Down.

In 2018, What to Send Up When It Goes Down was produced off-Broadway by The Movement Theatre Company in a Drama Desk-nominated, extended production. That production later traveled to the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington D.C., The Public Theater in New York for the Under the Radar Festival, and at Playwrights Horizons and Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.

In 2018, a production of Is God Is , written by Harris and directed by Taibi Magar, opened at Soho Rep in New York City and ran from February 6 to March 11. [13] Is God Is received 3 Obie Awards for Playwriting, Directing, and Performance. [14] [15] The play won the American Playwriting Foundation's Relentless Award in 2016. [8] [16] [17] The award gave Harris the opportunity to have stage readings in regional theaters across the country and abroad.

Awards

In addition the Relentless Award in 2016, Harris has been a two-time finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. [18]

In 2019, Harris received the Helen Merrill Award for playwriting. [19]

In 2020, Harris was awarded one of the eight Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes. [20] [18]

Quotes

"I noted that people seemed to have a very narrow view of what kind of space my body could occupy on stage — and I found that really frustrating. I decided to write plays." [21]

Regarding What to Send Up When It Goes Down: "It's a piece that is, ideally, a tool that communities can access when they're in crisis after someone has been killed. I feel very strongly that we need tools. Every oppressed population, every marginalized population needs tools for coping, and I hope that this can be one for black people." [22]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paula Vogel</span> American playwright

Paula Vogel is an American playwright who received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play How I Learned to Drive. A longtime teacher, Vogel spent the bulk of her academic career – from 1984 to 2008 – at Brown University, where she served as Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor in Creative Writing, oversaw its playwriting program, and helped found the Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium. From 2008 to 2012, Vogel was Eugene O'Neill Professor of Playwriting and department chair at the Yale School of Drama, as well as playwright in residence at the Yale Repertory Theatre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Suzan-Lori Parks</span> American playwright

Suzan-Lori Parks is an American playwright, screenwriter, musician and novelist. Her play Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002; Parks was the first African-American woman to receive the award for drama. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

Will Eno is an American playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. His play, Thom Pain was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2005. His play The Realistic Joneses appeared on Broadway in 2014, where it received a Drama Desk Special Award and was named Best Play on Broadway by USA Today, and best American play of 2014 by The Guardian. His play The Open House was presented Off-Broadway at the Signature Theatre in 2014 and won the Obie Award for Playwriting as well as other awards, and was on both TIME Magazine and Time Out New York 's Top Ten Plays of 2014.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lynn Nottage</span> American playwright

Lynn Nottage is an American playwright whose work often focuses on the experience of working-class people, particularly working-class people who are Black. She has received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice: in 2009 for her play Ruined, and in 2017 for her play Sweat. She was the first woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama two times.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tina Howe</span> American playwright (born 1937)

Tina Howe is an American playwright. In a career that spans more than four decades, Howe's best-known works include Museum, The Art of Dining, Painting Churches, Coastal Disturbances, and Pride's Crossing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">María Irene Fornés</span> American writer

María Irene Fornés was a Cuban-American playwright, theater director, and teacher who worked in off-Broadway and experimental theater venues in the last four decades of the twentieth century. Her plays range widely in subject-matter, but often depict characters with aspirations that belie their disadvantages. Fornés, who went by the name "Irene", received nine Obie Theatre Awards in various categories and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for 1990.

Gina Gionfriddo is an American playwright and television writer. Her plays Becky Shaw and Rapture, Blister, Burn were both finalists for the 2009 and 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, respectively. She has written for the television series Law & Order and "FBI: Most Wanted."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Annie Baker</span> American playwright and teacher

Annie Baker is an American playwright and teacher who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her play The Flick. Among her works are the Shirley, Vermont plays, which take place in the fictional town of Shirley: Circle Mirror Transformation, Nocturama, Body Awareness, and The Aliens. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.

Stephen Karam is an American playwright, screenwriter and director. His plays Sons of the Prophet, a comedy-drama about a Lebanese-American family, and The Humans were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2012 and 2016, respectively. The Humans won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Play, and Karam wrote and directed a film adaptation of the play, released in 2021.

The Flick is a play by Annie Baker that received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and won the 2013 Obie Award for Playwriting. The Flick premiered Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Branden Jacobs-Jenkins</span> American playwright (born 1984)

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is an American playwright. He won the 2014 Obie Award for Best New American Play for his plays Appropriate and An Octoroon. His plays Gloria and Everybody were finalists for the 2016 and 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, respectively. He was named a MacArthur Fellow for 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucas Hnath</span> American playwright

Lucas Hnath is an American playwright. He won the 2016 Obie Award for excellence in playwriting for his plays Red Speedo and The Christians. He also won a Whiting Award.

Lauren Yee is an American playwright.

Dominique Morisseau is an American playwright and actress from Detroit, Michigan. She has written more than nine plays, three of which are part of a cycle titled The Detroit Project. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018.

Clare Barron is a playwright and actor from Wenatchee, Washington. She won the 2015 Obie Award for Playwriting for You Got Older. She was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Dance Nation.

Julia Jarcho is an American experimental playwright and director and professor of theater and performance studies. The NYC company Minor Theater produces and debuts her new works. She won the 2013 Obie for Best New American Play for Grimly Handsome. Chief theater critic for The New York Times Ben Brantley has called her "a queen of experimental mayhem". Jarcho is an Associate Professor and Head the MFA Playwriting Program at Brown University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeremy O. Harris</span> American playwright and actor

Jeremy O. Harris is an American playwright, actor, and philanthropist, known for his plays "Daddy" and Slave Play. The latter received 12 nominations at the 74th Tony Awards, breaking the record previously set by the 2018 revival of Angels in America for most nominations for a non-musical play. Harris was the winner of the 2018 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, given by the Vineyard Theatre in New York City. A profile in the New York Times said that Harris's "ability to render subconscious trauma into provocative theatrical expression, as potentially unsettling as entertaining, has earned him a lot of attention in a very short time." Out called him "the queer black savior the theater world needs."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Feingold</span> American theater critic, translator and playwright (1945–2022)

Michael E. Feingold was an American critic, translator, lyricist, playwright and dramaturg. He was the lead theater critic of The Village Voice from 1982 to 2013, for which he was twice named a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism finalist, and was a two-time recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. He was a judge for the Obie Awards for 31 years, and the chairman for nine years. For his work as the translator and adapter of the book and lyrics of the Kurt Weill, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and Bertolt Brecht musical Happy End, he was nominated for two Tony Awards in 1977.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heidi Schreck</span> American writer and actress

Heidi Schreck is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actress from Wenatchee, Washington. Her play What the Constitution Means to Me, which she also performs in, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Awards for 2019 Best Play and Best Actress in a Play.

Is God Is is an American play by Aleshea Harris. In 2018 a production directed by Taibi Magar opened Off-Broadway at Soho Rep and ran from February 6 to March 11. The play looks at deviant morality, familial dysfunction, being a black girl/woman, and patricide.

References

  1. ↑ "Aleshea Harris". Aleshea Harris.
  2. ↑ Chow, Andrew R. (23 October 2016). "Aleshea Harris Wins a Playwriting Prize for 'Is God Is'" – via NYTimes.com.
  3. ↑ "Theater Talks: Playwrights Aleshea Harris & Jackie Sibblies Drury". The New York Public Library.
  4. ↑ "Meet the Playwrights : Aleshea Harris". www.seattlerep.org.
  5. ↑ "Aleshea Harris Receives American Playwriting Foundation's Relentless Award".
  6. ↑ "Aleshea Harris News". www.broadwayworld.com.
  7. ↑ "Aleshea Harris/Playwright/Polite Sheep Dog".
  8. 1 2 "Playwright Aleshea Harris Wins Relentless Award".
  9. ↑ "On the Road: The Collective Staged Three Plays in San Francisco Last Month".
  10. ↑ "In conversation with Aleshea Harris - The Occidental Weekly". 28 September 2016.
  11. ↑ Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (2019-04-05). "'What to Send Up When It Goes Down': A Black Gaze". AMERICAN THEATRE. Retrieved 2020-10-12.
  12. ↑ "Interpret - "What To Send Up When It Goes Down" by Aleshea Harris (Reading) + Open Discussion [w/ The Movement Theatre Co]". Interfest.
  13. ↑ BWW News Desk. "Soho Rep. Announces Complete Casting And Creative Team For Aleshea Harris's IS GOD IS".
  14. ↑ "Describe the Night, Will Swenson, Dominique Morisseau, More Win 2018 Obie Awards". Playbill.
  15. ↑ ""Mary Jane" and "Is God Is" Achieve a Glorious Trifecta at the 63rd Obie Awards". Village Voice.
  16. ↑ "American Award, Prestige Abroad for Aleshea Harris - Creative Pinellas". creativepinellas.org. Archived from the original on 2018-01-25. Retrieved 2018-01-24.
  17. ↑ Coakley, Jacob (24 October 2016). "Aleshea Harris Wins 2016 Relentless Award - Stage Directions".
  18. 1 2 "Aleshea Harris". Windham Campbell Prizes. Retrieved 2020-10-12.
  19. ↑ "Five Talented Playwrights Win $30,000 Helen Merrill Awards". The New York Community Trust. 2019-06-19. Retrieved 2020-10-12.
  20. ↑ Flood, Alison (2020-03-19). "Eight authors share $1m prize as writers face coronavirus uncertainty". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2020-03-20.
  21. ↑ "Playwright Aleshea Harris Wins The Relentless Award for "Is God Is"". 24 October 2016.
  22. ↑ Sylvia Sukop, "'Responding to a world which no longer makes sense': An interview with playwright Aleshea Harris", Huffington Post, June 20th, 2016.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.