Soho Rep. Reopens With Aleshea Harris' IS GOD IS

Soho Rep. (Sarah Benson, Artistic Director; Cynthia Flowers, Executive Director) reopens its iconic downtown Manhattan theater with the world premiere of Aleshea Harris's Relentless Award-winning Is God Is, directed by Taibi Magar (Ars Nova's Underground Railroad Game), February 6 - March 11, 2018. In this play, which dauntlessly cracks jokes as it eviscerates, twin sisters Anaia and Racine undertake a murderous journey from the Dirty South to the California desert, seeking payback for a horrendous act. Is God Is treats both morality and genre as notions to be exploded, drawing on the ancient, the modern, the tragic, the Spaghetti Western, hip-hop and Afropunk in its subversion of theatrical constructs.

Aleshea Harris says of Is God Is, "Through this work, I sought to answer what I felt were compelling questions: What would happen if women who had been abused sought eye-for-an-eye justice for themselves and each other unapologetically? What if I wrote characters who spoke a language I spoke growing up (and still speak, depending), a language I've rarely experienced onstage, a language that eschews respectability politics, opting instead for gut-wrenching, unflinching honesty? And what if I took my cues from visual poets like Douglas Kearney and the graphic version of Ionesco's The Bald Soprano, letting the words of my play dance across the page as seems to fit character intention?"

Born in Mississippi and based in Los Angeles, Aleshea Harris performs her own solo work, in addition to being an acclaimed playwright, screenwriter and poet. Her multidisciplinary background has informed her proclivity for writing specifically for actors, creating disruptive, challenging and magnetic roles. Harris situates her work within an Afropunk ideology that explodes perceptions of how black people think, move, and sound; Is God Is explores and relishes the nuances of black Southern speech. In writing the play, she sought to place herself where culture has never allowed her to see herself. Here, she puts black women characters in the driver's seat of the alternately exhilarating and desolating Western genre. Anaia and Racine take the audience on a fast and merciless ride.

The premiere of this audacious work exemplifies the indispensable role of Soho Rep.: to provide a platform for artists to realize their boldest visions, in productions that are regularly among the most ambitious and acclaimed offerings of the theater season. Is God Is received the American Playwriting Foundation's 2016 Relentless Award, presented in honor of Philip Seymour Hoffman. This engagement is the first New York production of one of Harris' plays. She joins a history of playwrights whose breakthrough productions have happened at Soho Rep., including César Alvarez, Alice Birch, Jackie Sibblies Drury, debbie tucker green, Lucas Hnath, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Young Jean Lee, and Dan LeFranc.

Is God Is kicks off Soho Rep.'s triumphant return to the Lower Manhattan storefront it has called home for over 25 years. Soho Rep. Artistic Director Sarah Benson says, "I could not think of a more perfect play with which to welcome audiences back into our theater. When I was sent two of Aleshea's plays I began reading one of them late at night, and before I knew it I had stayed up for hours immersed in her work. I emailed her the very next morning to talk about making a production of Is God Is at Soho Rep. Aleshea's writing is a force. In Is God Is she has created nothing short of a new theatrical landscape populated by some of the most stunning roles for actors I've ever encountered. I cannot wait to share it with our audiences-especially under the direction of Taibi Magar, who I know will summon everything in her brilliant theatrical arsenal to bring this extraordinary play to the stage."

Soho Rep. will announce the cast and creative team for Is God Is soon.

Performances of Is God Is will take place February 6 - March 11 (see schedule above) at Soho Rep., located at 46 Walker Street in Manhattan. Critics are welcome as of February 14 for an official opening on Sunday, February 18 at 7:30pm. Admission tickets are $35 general/$65 premium through March 11, and can be purchased by visiting sohorep.org or calling 212.352.3101. $30 general rush and $20 student rush (valid school ID) tickets are available at the box office 30 minutes prior to curtain for each performance, no advance sales. $0.99 Sunday tickets will be offered on February 25, March 4 & 11 at 7:30pm and are available first come, first served at the box office only.

Aleshea Harris is a playwright, performer and educator who received an MFA in Writing for Performance from California Institute of the Arts. Most recently, she was named the winner of the American Playwriting Foundation's 2016 Relentless Award for Is God Is. Her work has been presented at the Costume Shop at American Conservatory Theater, Playfest at Orlando Shakespeare Theater, VOXfest at Dartmouth College, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Theatre @ Boston Court, L'École de la Comédie de Saint-Étienne, National Drama Center in France and in the 2015 anthology The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. Harris is under commission from Denver Center Theatre Company, American Conservatory Theater and CalArts' Center for New Performance/La Comedie de Saint-Etiénne. She is a MacDowell Fellow and a Hedgebrook alum.

Taibi Magar is an Egyptian-American director based in New York, and a graduate of the Brown/Trinity MFA program. Most recently she directed the critically acclaimed Master at the Foundry Theatre (New York Times Critics Pick). Other recent projects include Underground Railroad Game (Ars Nova, New York Times Critics Pick, OBIE Award for Best New American Work), Dry Powder (The Alley) and We Are Proud to Present...(The Guthrie).

In New York, Magar has directed and developed work for The Foundry, New York Theatre Workshop, Ars Nova, TFANA, the Women's Project Theatre, Rising Phoenix Rep and INTAR Theatre. She is the recipient of a Stephen Sondheim Fellowship, an Oregon Shakespeare Festival Fellowship, a Public Theater Shakespeare Fellowship and the TFANA Actors and Director Project Fellowship, and is an alumna of Lincoln Center Directors Lab. Most recently, she received the Kaplan Fellowship for young artists. She has directed and taught at many academic institutions, including Juilliard, Fordham University, Brown University and New York University.

Magar is currently developing Patrick and Daniel Lazour's We Live in Cairo (2016 Richard Rodgers Award) with New York Theatre Workshop. Upcoming projects include Familiar (The Guthrie and Seattle Repertory Theatre), Sense and Sensibility (Playmakers Rep) and Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare Festival St. Louis).

Founded in 1975, and in its theater on Walker Street since 1991, Soho Rep. has built an outstanding reputation for being at the forefront of new and innovative theater, serving as a vital center for contemporary theatre artists.

Soho Rep. is dedicated to cultivating and producing visionary, uncompromising, and exuberant new plays, performing to one of the youngest adult audiences in New York City, with over half aged 18-40.

Critics continue to herald Soho Rep. as a go-to theatre destination for new and original works. New York Magazine says, "this indispensable theater offers more excitement per chair than any space in town," Time Out New York says, "Soho Rep is the best theater in NYC," and The New York Times declares Soho Rep. to be "a first-class downtown company" and says, "The downtown powerhouse...regularly outclasses the work done on many of the city's larger stages." In 2015, The Village Voice named Soho Rep. the "Best Off-Broadway Theater Company," and the company was listed in Travel Magazine's 2016 "10 Essential Off-Broadway Theaters."

In 2014, Soho Rep. was honored with a Drama Desk Award for Sustained Achievement. Over the last decade, Soho Rep. productions have garnered 18 OBIE Awards; the 2016 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical; 13 Drama Desk nominations, two Kesselring Awards, The New York Times Outstanding Playwriting Award for Dan LeFranc's Sixty Miles To Silverlake and, a special citation in The New York Drama Critics' Circle's 2012-13 awards. In recent years, Soho Rep. has presented plays by established and emerging theatre artists such as David Adjmi, Annie Baker, Alice Birch, debbie tucker green, Lucas Hnath, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Daniel Alexander Jones, Richard Maxwell, Sarah Kane, Young Jean Lee, Nature Theater of Oklahoma and Anne Washburn.

Is God Is kicks off Soho Rep.'s triumphant return to its intimate Walker Street storefront theater, once described by Hilton Als of The New Yorker as "a 70-seat house filled with big ideas." In September 2016, following the discovery that the company had been producing in the space, since moving into the building 1991, without having obtained the proper Certificate of Occupancy, the potential for returning to its intimate home felt slim. Thanks, however, to a citywide effort including the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment and the Department of Buildings, Soho Rep. has resolved the bureaucratic issues and made the modest renovations required to move back in, having successfully completed a $500,000 building fundraising campaign led by Executive Director Cynthia Flowers and the Soho Rep. Board with leadership support from The Tow Foundation. Overcoming that hurdle has cleared the way for the company to once again do what it has become esteemed for in its life to date: provide a platform for vastly diverse artists to realize work that is consistently big in scope, formally challenging and civically engaged.

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