Watching Aleshea Harris’ “Is God Is” play out in its fast and furious regional premiere at Old Town’s intimate A Red Orchid Theatre is akin to watching Aeschylus filtered through “Kill Bill” and sonically sprinkled with a dose of Spaghetti Western music landing like parmesan on blood.
There’s also a bit of the Biblical to the piece, directed at a blazing pace by Marti Gobel through a story as wrathful as the Old Testament and populated by a family as unnerving, unforgettable and slaughterous as their forebears at the House of Atreus.
In the tale of twin sisters on a murderous mission from their mother, Harris uses the circumstances of a single family to illustrate a cycle of violence that seems about as inescapable as a cloak woven by the Fates and dropped on you in the womb.
Harris’ script, which won both the 2018 Obie Award for Playwriting and the 2016 Relentless Award (created in honor of Philip Seymour Hoffman), sputters periodically, mostly when well-crafted characters step out of the action to narrate. Telling rather than showing is rarely a sound dramatic idea because it removes the audience from the action. It’s also not an insurmountable issue here.
The tale begins with twins Anaia (Ashli Rene Funches) and Racine (Aja Singletary). They’re in their early 20s, and they’ve been without their parents for 18 years. They have vague memories of their father, simply called Man (Kevin Minor) setting fire to their mother, She (Karen Aldridge) before leaving the toddler twins and She to burn.
In the first scene, Anaia and Racine are shocked to learn She isn’t dead after all, but has been in a “rest home” for years. So the twins set out to find their mother, who in turn sends them on a quest that results in a significant body count and says something where restraining orders intended to protect women are about as effective as throwing a snowflake to put out an inferno.
The matter of the restraining order is only briefly mentioned, but like everything else She recalls about the night of the fire (and its aftermath), it is rendered unforgettable in Aldridge’s haunting, kinetic performance.
Aldridge veers from maternal to vengeful with a sinewy grace that makes nightmarishly clear how damaged she is. Like Clytemnestra and Medea, she isn’t inherently monstrous, crazy or evil. She has, however, lost everything she loved at the hands of a man who is all three things.
Singletary is a powerhouse as Racine, who has made it her mission to protect her sister, and has enough “meanness” to get that job done. Funches is a heartbreaker as Anaia, raging toward the long-gone father who maimed her, and the mother who seemingly abandoned her and Racine. Their sisterhood onstage is palpable.
En route to carry out their mother’s scorched-earth directive, Racine and Anaia get vengefully bloody with a host of memorable supporting players, including twin brothers Scotch (Andrew Muwonge) and Riley (Donovan Session), the brothers’ desperately unhappy mother Angie (Rita Wicks), and one Chuck Hall (Sherman Edwards), the lawyer/fixer who helped Man escape to a brand new life after the fire.
Between Gobel’s dreamlike, choreographed scene transitions, the bodies pile up, each death ruthless, complex and — a credit to Harris’ writing — unexpected.
Composer Kemet Gobel’s original music suits the piece well, never more so than when Minor’s menacing Man moves to it with the wily fluidity of a rattlesnake stirring from its nest.
The maelstrom plays out on Sydney Lynne’s relatively open set, all the better to accommodate the crunching brutality of Jyreika Guest’s wince-inducing fight choreography.
Throughout, the twins center the maelstrom, not choosing violence so much as it chooses them. Clytemnestra and Medea would surely understand.
