Twin sisters covered in burn scars from a childhood accident are called to their mother’s deathbed. There, they learn it was their father who set the fire that disfigured them, and are instructed to seek revenge.
This is the setup that underpins Is God Is, an award-winning 2016 play by Aleshea Harris, reimagined as her onscreen directorial debut and released earlier this month. The firsttime filmmaker’s remarkably confident work stars Kara Young and newcomer Mallori Johnson as the fearsome twosome, along with Vivica A. Fox as mom (or “God,” as her kids call her), Sterling K. Brown as dad, and Janelle Monaé as step-mom. Though Harris rings her new medium out for all the style it can hold (think braids that stretch across a room and cameras whipping around a church congregation), the dialogue she offers her actors is undoubtedly the exacting and weighty work of a playwright.
Harris’s original script is as stirring to read as its performance is to behold: When a character is shy, the type gets very small. When a character feels emotionally distant, their lines likewise move farther apart. Harris drew this penchant for avant-garde typography from a 1964 edition of Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, featuring layouts by Robert Massin that unspool words in delightfully unorthodox ways, and provide one of the most distinct signatures of her debut: captions. The typeface itself comes courtesy of master title designer Teddy Blanks, one of the most quietly influential figures behind the box office (who has worked on Wicked, Barbie, Nosferatu, Severance, and on and on and on). Here, Aleshea takes us through the lettering the two of them devised with help from a mid-century, out-of-print paperback and vintage metal sheets.
How did this project go from play to debut film?
I was actually teaching at CalArts, and we studied ancient Greek theater. I was listening to my colleague teach this play and this prompt popped into mind, which was like, What would a Greek tragedy look like if you populated it with people who look and sound like yourself? This play takes its cues from the ancient, the Western, hip hop, afropunk, all these other subcultures. It was doing things I hadn’t quite seen done and certainly hadn’t been done with Black women at the center.
Janicza Bravo [a producer on the film] was the one who said, “You should direct this. This is your movie.” I’m a pretty hands-on playwright, so I felt like I had worked some of the muscles that were necessary. But I have to say, it was a whole different ballgame to have an army, a tsunami, of people wanting to get in my head. It was intense. Directing the actors was one of the easiest aspects of this.
I have a lot of experience actually dealing with actors as a playwright. Just chatting about what the play is, who the character is, I feel like I’ve done that quite a bit. These actors were so warm, so supportive, so welcoming, and they believed in me, which was tremendous gas in the tank when you’re doing something for the first time. I remember Sterling was so enthusiastic the first time we talked. He was on the go with his kids and so pumped about this movie, and he just seemed to understand what his role was meant to do inside of this world.
Was there anything you carried from one performance to the next, play to film, and one set of actors to another?
I learned a lot from having read and seen the play, and I think I understood what some of the pitfalls could be. I really wanted the characters to have great nuance, right? There’s a way, when you’re dealing with Western tropes, as we are, and some aspects of a revenge narrative, to just [make people] black and white. I wanted us to be able to live in the gray. That’s something that I definitely carried over from production. The mother, the size that she has—there’s a lot in naming a person, “God.” Feeling that on the stage and how effective and impactful that was, I certainly wanted to carry that over, and I hope that we did effectively.
With the typography, the reason that I wanted to carry that over is because people responded so strongly to that on the page. It’s such an important texture of this world that again speaks to what this universe is, which is not exactly realistic, or I should say, rooted in realism. The poetry of it, the language, how to keep the rhythm of the language, and what was interesting and quirky and weird and dark about the play, I didn’t want to lose. We kept those rhythms and that soul of, you know, off-Broadway, down and dirty, adventurous, boisterous.
I would love to talk more about the typography. When I took a look at the different spreads of The Bald Soprano, it is really interesting how a two-dimensional project can be so expressive. How did you first come upon this book?
I don’t know how I first encountered this version of it, but I do know that every time I see it, I’m entranced. I must have come upon this thing and been obsessed. I studied visual art before I studied theater, so I’m really interested in how things are laid out on the page or on a screen. Composition is really important to me. A visual poet named Douglas Kearney was my advisor, my mentor, in grad school when I was at CalArts, before I taught there. He did such tremendous things with language on the page, just to deepen the reader’s experience. I thought it was magical. You’re broadening the palette and the horizon of what is possible in your storytelling.
I felt like I was being given permission by Ionesco and Robert Massin to go bonkers crazy in support of the story I wanted to tell. Back then, I used to write a lot more by hand and would do these things where the language was coming up the side of the page or moving in a spiral. Obviously, when you’re watching a movie, you’re not going to sit and read the entire narrative. I needed to find a new way. And the way that I found was something that I call “twintuition.” The twins communicate [in a way] that no one else can hear, which we experience in the movie as subtitles.
That felt like an organic way to bring that performative language to the fore and let it continue to be a part of the fabric of Is God is. Absurdism is a response to trauma. The twins, a lot of the things they do and the way that they are is a response to trauma, and it makes sense to me that that texture should be played out visually.
The person who did our titles is named Teddy Blanks, and he’s brilliant. He read the play and did his own study and created a font. He had a book of fonts from the ’50s, metal fonts, I think he called them. So he was thinking a lot about how that metal had to be pressed, had to be burned into the paper or whatever the surface was. Obviously there’s a rhyme with that and the burn scars on the twins, and it’s a little bit rough around the edges. It’s one of those things that, as an audience member, I hope you’ll experience on a mitochondrial level.
With The Bald Soprano, is this something that you feel like you keep coming back to?
The performative typography is there. I have to be careful not to use it cause it’s my thing, right? You don’t wanna have this trope. It really needs to feel like the character needs it, or the moment needs it. I just love the way that you can play with the language to help us feel what the characters are feeling, and then to feel separation when one person’s language looks like this and the other’s looks like that. We understand viscerally that they’re a bit apart. I always will consider it a tool in the toolbox, but this was the story where I really went kind of bonkers with it.
Can you tell me a little bit more about how you leveraged it in the play itself?
There are moments when a character feels quite small. She feels forgotten or misunderstood, or she’s keeping a secret, and then the type is quite small. In order to capture the sense that there is no language for the immensity of an emotion after this event, I would just like to make it scattershot and nonsensical. There’s these explosions of language.
I felt like, how can you place these so that it’s less about readability or just communicating a word, but communicating the goosebumps on the skin or the sense of being adrift that the character is feeling. How can you make the word feel as lonely as this character feels?
It’s an interesting approach, going beyond the word, because the traditional idea is that when you’re reading, it all happens in your head. Everything is internal. Did the actors have a response to this idea?
The actors, to my face anyway, have seemed quite excited. It felt to them like a tool and not like it was taking the place of doing their job for them. It never could, even if it wanted to. It was just a different way of flexing inside of what was already there.
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