Review Roundup: ON SUGARLAND at New York Theatre Workshop

New York Theatre Workshop just celebrated opening night of On Sugarland by Obie Award winner Aleshea Harris (Is God Is, What to Send Up When It Goes Down). On Sugarland is directed by Obie Award winner, NYTW Usual Suspect & former 2050 Fellow Whitney White (Semblance, What to Send Up When It Goes Down) and choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly (Hurricane Diane, The House That Will Not Stand).

Sugarland is on precarious soil-three mobile homes line a southern cul-de-sac replete with years and years of decorative folk-art treasures and keepsakes. Young Sadie calls on generations of matriarchal ancestors to find the truth about her mother while the denizens of Sugarland rise each day to holler for the dead-conscripted soldiers lost to a greedy war-in a ritual reclamation of timeless grief.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Maya Phillips, New York Times: With her direction, Whitney White occasionally dips too far into melodrama, but otherwise nimbly adapts to the tonal shifts and key changes of Harris's script. Raja Feather Kelly's electric choreography adds a physical syncopation (stomping, marching, pacing, dancing) that complements the rhythms of the dialogue.

Helen Shaw, Vulture: Harris already has two major New York productions behind her: Is God Is, a Western revenge comedy with chilling references to domestic homicide, and What to Send Up When It Goes Down, a participatory homegoing for Black people killed by police. The former depended on a genre structure as old as the hills; the latter seemed older than that, using ritual strategies that probably predate the use of fire. It turns out that Harris's lyric excess - her characters speak in dazzling torrents - needs such old, strong bones. In On Sugarland she scales up and out, inviting in more characters than she can safely handle, calling on myths and multiple framing techniques that shake her own storytelling abilities to their roots. The play flexes in both senses of the word. It shows off Harris's impressive poetic muscles, but it also bends out of true, warping a little from what she asks it to contain.

Robert Hofler, The Wrap: Whitney White's direction of his actors is masterful. Together with Berry and Mitchell's brilliant comedy routine, Jones and Layne in their far more somber roles help to keep the many disparate elements of "On Sugarland" running on the same track. Adam Rigg's purposefully messy set design even separates the stage from the audience with railroad tracks. A government that asks the ultimate sacrifice of these people in turn has no respect for them. Those same railroad tracks run right through the middle of Sugarland's cemetery.

Naveen Kumar, New York Theatre Guide: Harris imagines a dramatic plane at once rooted in dirt and suspended in time and space, where it's possible to take a revealing, unfettered look at truths unmoored from their social contexts. That the provenance and logic of the war go unnamed is to the point - death will always come, and for Black people most urgently. Exhuming that foundational trauma, holding it up for audiences to feel, understand, and mourn, takes a daring and determined imagination that goes beyond words. It takes a hollering.

Melissa Rose Bernardo, New York Stage Review: On Sugarland feels both overstuffed and underwritten. When Saul starts in about returning to the front lines-"A warrior gotta serve"-and when his "special" son Addis (Caleb Eberhardt) goes on and on about his role in Junior Cadets and training to follow in his father's footsteps, it grows tiresome. We want to see more of Evelyn, who wears a ballgown and crown-excuse me, tiara-to funerals.

David Finkle, New York Stage Review: Aleshea Harris would likely accept that On Sugarland is best regarded as a fantasy or a dream. An avoidance of stark reality marks her often immediately involving works. Indeed, On Sugarland begins in surreal fashion when 14-year-old Sadie (Kiki Layne) steps into designer Amith Chandrashaker's solo light and declares, "I can make the dead walk." Hard not to pay attention to a play beginning that way. Explaining how she does her unlikely magic, she ventures into what she knows of her great-great-great grandmother, who wasn't a slave but had to earn her living as if she still was.

Juan Michael Porter II, Theatrely: In a blistering critique of how the military industrial complex preys upon Black communities with false promises of American security and benefits, Harris uses West African storytelling traditions to lay bare that the gods who demand you holler, but fail to honor you back, are hardly worthy of worship. She sets this up by interweaving a series of complex relationships that have arisen within Sugarland a?? a feeder community to a military base, somewhere in the South, where, unlike the fantasies in Langston Hughes' poem, dreams aren't given the time to defer or explode.

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