As playwright Aleshea Harris tells it, something felt missing when she first sat down to write her searing and startling play “Is God Is,” which made waves off-Broadway in 2018.
Harris was writing an epic story of Black female revenge, one that drew on Greek tragedy and mythology, but also spaghetti westerns and a liberal dose of Quentin Tarantino, among other things. There was a hero character, but it wasn’t enough. That’s when Harris realized it should be a story of sisters. Twin sisters.
Twins, Harris theorized, bring immediate and profound drama, What’s similar about them, and what’s different? How often do they agree, and what happens when they don’t? It was a crucial creative decision both for the Obie-winning play and now, the movie adaptation Harris has written and directed — a no less startling piece of work, eight years later.
And so we have Racine and Anaia, one of the more fascinating sets of twins to grace a movie screen. Racine (two-time Tony winner Kara Young, funny and fierce), is expressive, emotional, aggressive, sometimes joyful. Anaia (newcomer Mallori Johnson, deeply moving), is quieter, more deliberate, ostensibly meeker.
At age 21, they share everything: a living space, clothing, the same blond braids. They speak and even think in tandem, to the point where regular dialogue is sometimes replaced, cleverly, with subtitles — their communicating doesn’t need words. Heck, they can even pee at the same time.
More profoundly, they share similar, horrific scars — suffered in a fire set by their father when they were small girls, in an attempt to kill their mother. Racine’s scars cover her arm and travel onto her back, while Anaia’s cover her face, permanently altering how the world sees her.
In the prologue, we learn that Racine has been avenging her sister, whenever she’s called ugly because of those scars, since they were children. Then, back to present time. The twins receive a letter they never expected.
“We got a mama!?” they exclaim. They’d thought she’d died in the fire.
But now, Mother — or God, as the girls refer to the woman who made them (a tragically regal Vivica A. Fox) — has summoned them from their abode somewhere in the Northeast to her deathbed down South, where she, too, lies covered in scars.
And she has one request: that her girls avenge her.
The twins argue, as they begin the journey in their beat-up Oldsmobile. Anaia is not feeling this mission. But Racine is. And in a striking moment, Anaia imagines how life would have been without her disfiguring scars.
Nobody knows where “Man” is — that’s the only name we get for this character — but they know the first stop: A cultlike church where a preacher woman lives with the son she bore him and saves his belongings, in a shrine. From there, clues lead them to a lawyer who has lost his tongue to the man’s evils. Literally.
“Do you ever want to scrape off those scars and see what’s underneath?” one twins asks the other at a point along the way. The question sticks with us.
Finally, we reach the luxurious suburban home where Man has been living a life of comfort with his wife Angie (Janelle Monáe, memorable in a brief but violent appearance here) and twin sons. Yes, more twins.
Angie appears to be making some sort of great escape. (She picked the day that Racine and Anaia arrived, wouldn’t you know.) “Mom, what are we gonna do for dinner?” one of Angie’s annoyed sons calls out. This may be a Greek tragedy, transported to the contemporary American South, but men asking about dinner is universal.
Ultimately, Man arrives home. Let’s just say he’ll need to make his own sandwich.
You may think you know Sterling K. Brown, but trust us, you have never seen this version of Brown — a man utterly dripping with villainy, if villainy were in liquid form, and all the more chilling for the calmness with which he intones the most horrific thoughts.
Especially about rage. Man, in a fateful conversation, explains his murderous actions in a “logical” argument about justifiable male rage.
We all know what happens, basically, at the end of a Greek tragedy. It’s nothing good. Add that dose of Tarantino inspo, and you get the picture.
But let’s go back to that issue of rage.
Because here is where Harris’ message seems to emerge at its loudest and clearest: Rage is not an arena open exclusively to men. It’s not something that becomes explicable only for those who possess the Y chromosome. Yet women, and especially Black women, often have to apologize for their anger, Harris says.
The playwright offers no apologies for her twins on their life-altering, rage-filled journey.
“Do you ever want to scrape off those scars and see what’s underneath?” one of the twins had asked — remember? Turns out, they didn’t need to remove the scars to find out.
“Is God Is,” an Amazon MGM Studios release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association “for strong/bloody violence and language.” Running time: 99 minutes. Three stars out of four.
