Playwright Aleshea Harris and Director Whitney White Bond


Whitney White: I first met Aleshea through her work; I’d read your script for “.is god” (2018) and I have never seen anything so stunning, breathtaking, brutal and extremely feminine. Someone from Harlem’s Movement Theater Company called me and said, “We’re playing your next play,” and I said, “Please let me talk to him; Let me find a way to guide you.” I read “What to Send When It Drops?” (2019) and once again took off my socks with the same diligence and strength. This was our first collaboration and we’ve since moved on to our second:in Sugarland” [about a Black community in the South, which finished its run at New York Theatre Workshop last month].

Aleshea creates fully formed worlds. When she says something, she means she. When she wants something, she goes for it. It’s hard to have a bottom line in the theater world, to have the boundaries and an aesthetic to which you’re committed. But that’s what he does every day. As a director, I am attracted to broad visions of expression and Aleshea helps keep things honest. At the same time, I think ours is a very delicious tension – between being grounded and wanting to leap into other worlds.

During “What to Send When It Drops” in BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music] We went to taqueria in 2020 tacombi practically every day. Eating together builds community, fraternity, and family. And food is a theatrical tradition: one of the important practices of the French director Ariane Mnouchkine For actors to feed the audience at La Cartoucherie in Paris. I love dining with Aleshea – there’s something powerful about women getting together and being hungry.

This is reflected in the work. In any creative practice, you should dig as deep as possible; You cannot lie to yourself. So I get greedy about the preparation, sweep it all away and leave it on the stage.

Alexea Harris: Whitney talks a lot about being greedy. It’s especially important for Black women because we often make us feel we don’t deserve certain things. That’s why I really like the policy of being greedy with food and work – this idea where I’m allowed to have whatever I want.

Most of the time then. I like to say I’m fine but slow. I want to create something extraordinary for my meticulous and potential partners. I want them to feel a little scared and a little clumsy just like me. I want to give a gift to Black players and Black people, a game they’ve never seen before. I want to give them the opportunity to feel wide, challenged, loved and nurtured. So it ceases to be a very lonely process – for months, for years it’s just me – and then suddenly, there’s an army of people with all these thoughts, ideas, questions and opinions. There is so much that I need to feed my soul to give this baby that I have been holding on tight for years. But it’s good to have a midwife at Whitney – the folk queen of my border queen – she’s a great intermediary to help that baby and be a source of reassurance that everything will be alright.

This interview has been edited and shortened.



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