“A good holler starts in the toes,” says Saul (Billy Eugene Jones), the veteran who leads the funerals that his community holds for its fallen soldiers. Saul, whose own toes were casualties of his time on the battlefield—his foot has apparently been bleeding since he came home from the frontlines eight years ago—refers to the “hollering,” a ritual at the center of Aleshea Harris’s On Sugarland at New York Theater Workshop.
These hollerings, held in front of a graveyard-like sculpture garden called Sugarland, built out of objects belonging to the dead, bring neighbors together in a convulsive, soul-baring expulsion of suffering that eventually erupts into something close to cathartic celebration. Outside of those moments of boundary-busting grief, though, most everyone in the cul-de-sac, a collection of mobile homes walled in by railroad tracks and an ever-encroaching war, has something about them that prevents them from connecting fully with others.
For one, Saul’s tortured memory fades in and out throughout the production. Elsewhere, Saul’s teenage son, Addis (Caleb Eberhardt), desperately wants to be a warrior like his father, but he’s “special,” tormented by peers who mock him for his neurodivergence. Mourning a lost love and a long-absent sister who saddled her with a niece to care for, Odella (Adeola Role) wants to find solace in meditation but more often turns to drink. And 14-year-old Sadie (KiKi Layne) is entirely mute, except when she turns to the audience to share the stories of matriarchal vengeance that she’s learned from speaking to the spirits of her ancestors.
Harris intentionally generalizes the where and when of On Sugarland’s setting and the war she depicts. References to civilian casualties and an ever-expanding draft resonate startlingly with current events in Europe, but the play’s conflict feels at least partly symbolic, an endless battle for liberation dating back to the time of Sadie’s great-great-great grandmother, who carried messages for Union soldiers. The enemy, Harris ultimately suggests, has never changed.
In her 2017 play What to Send Up When It Goes Down, Harris created a series of rituals in which the audience participated, honoring and mourning all of the Black lives that have been lost to racist violence. In On Sugarland, ritual is less the medium than the subject: Even beyond those searing hollerings, the play’s deliberate repetitions reveal how its characters rely upon the recurring scenes they share to make meaning of a fractured world.
Most audience members won’t be aware that Harris’s scripts go on what she calls “adventures in typography”: ever-widening spacing, sudden changes in font size, and letters that burst out of words or drip on diagonals down the page. It’s this visual artistry that makes the text feel so musical, as breaths and elongations of phrases seem orchestrated by the striking formatting. And director Whitney White captures those rhythms in the varied staging that spreads out across (and up and down) Adam Rigg’s multi-level set. That sense of shifting space also ensures that On Sugarland doesn’t feel anywhere close to its nearly three-hour running time.
Harris’s abstraction falters only in the character of Addis, whose neurological difference, which seems to manifest occasionally in violence, make some describe him as “slow” and others as a “menace.” But it’s never really clear how Harris perceives him, and his far-from-mystical otherness comes perilously close to taking on metaphorical meaning alongside his father’s ever-rotting foot or Sadie’s spirit-raising silence. Still, Eberhardt’s intemperate performance stands out among the stellar cast, as does Role’s destructive, haunted Odella. Except within those impassioned scenes of ritual, the purpose of an eight-person adolescent Greek chorus of sorts called The Rowdy also doesn’t quite cohere.
But that intended interplay between the recursive lives of crisply etched characters and the intergenerational forces that keep them in place takes off particularly beautifully in the tenderly tempestuous relationship between the elders of the cul-de-sac, sisters Tisha (Lizan Mitchell) and Evelyn (Stephanie Berry). Tisha’s the ever-respectful and self-sacrificing caretaker of Sugarland—her own son is memorialized there—but Evelyn’s mainly focused on celebrating herself. “You have done it this time, you pristine little minx,” she crows to herself as she dons a ballgown and tiara to attend a funeral. Berry, who puckishly animates Evelyn’s nasty penchant for speaking her mind to people she finds ugly (“I want them to know why the’re having such a difficult time in life”), is howlingly funny.
Yet Evelyn’s vanity crystallizes as a clear-eyed culmination of a life crafted around communal pain. “I am not cursing the doing of things. I am cursing their necessity,” she explains, in one of the rare moments where she dials down her self-aggrandizing sarcasm and speaks unembellished truth. “I am cursing the conditions which have led to what have become our customs.” Harris makes plain that Evelyn would rather manufacture her own individual pleasure than participate in communal rituals that she interprets as the outgrowths of injustice. As for everyone else, the next hollering on Sugarland can’t be far off.
On Sugarland is now running at the New York Theater Workshop.
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