On Sugarland
by Aleshea Harris

Off-Broadway

On Sugarland Book Cover — On Sugarland Cover

Highlights

Female

Male

120 mins Role(s) for Black Actor(s) Exterior Set Contemporary Costumes/Street Clothes

Awards & Recognition

Pulitzer Prize

Finalist: 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Synopsis

Sugarland is on precarious soil—three mobile homes line a southern cul-de-sac replete with years and years of decorative folk-art treasures and keepsakes.

Twelve-year-old Sadie calls on generations of matriarchal ancestors to find the truth about her mother while the denizens of Sugarland rise each day to holler for the dead—conscripted soldiers lost to a greedy war—in a ritual reclamation of timeless grief.

This sweeping new work from Obie Award-winning playwright Aleshea Harris is at once a spectacular pageant and a spirited meditation on remarkable people transcending difficult circumstances.

Press Reviews

"[Harris'] work often lifts the everyday trauma of being alive, especially as a Black person, to the plane of poetry through heightened language, songs, rituals and symbols... she is one of the best navigators of shifts in language and registers, even within a single scene. So we get tasty figurative gumdrops that subtly illuminate the inner thoughts of the characters, like the glamorous Evelyn’s description of the setting sun, which, she says, looks ‘like a starlet whose solo is over’... The play’s most intoxicating moments are when all of those bodies are onstage hollering, each moving in such carefully curated directions in such diligently structured postures that they become like a liberated tableau."
— The New York Times

"★★★★ “Dreamlike... Harris imagines a dramatic plane at once rooted in dirt and suspended in time and space, where it's possible to take a revealing, unfettered look at truths unmoored from their social contexts. That the provenance and logic of the war go unnamed is to the point — death will always come, and for Black people most urgently. Exhuming that foundational trauma, holding it up for audiences to feel, understand, and mourn, takes a daring and determined imagination that goes beyond words. It takes a hollering."
— New York Theatre Guide

"An epic narrative... In a blistering critique of how the military industrial complex preys upon Black communities with false promises of American security and benefits, Harris uses West African storytelling traditions to lay bare that the gods who demand you holler, but fail to honor you back, are hardly worthy of worship... what Harris and White created is the future of theatre that Americans have been clamoring for, for decades."
— Theatrely

"You could watch all of On Sugarland and enjoy it and get it and never worry about Harris’s connections to Sophocles. Still, they’re there, subterranean allusions running far beneath the cul-de-sac... Harris is clearly interested in plowing deep, and what she delves for, she finds."
— Vulture

Characters

Character	Gender	Age	Description
SADIE 14 years old. Can wake the dead.	—	14	14 years old. Can wake the dead.
ODELLA Late 30s. Sadie’s aunt. In mourning.	—	30s	Late 30s. Sadie’s aunt. In mourning.
ADDIS 17 years old. Wants to be a warrior.	—	17	17 years old. Wants to be a warrior.
SAUL Late 30s. Father of Addis. Mourning his rotting foot. Walks with a pronounced limp.	male	30s	Late 30s. Father of Addis. Mourning his rotting foot. Walks with a pronounced limp.
TISHA Late 60s. Tends the earth and the dead.	—	60s	Late 60s. Tends the earth and the dead.
EVELYN Late 60s. Tends herself.	—	60s	Late 60s. Tends herself.
THE ROWDY A chorus of neighborhood youths, male/female/nonbinary, aged 13-18.	female	13-18	A chorus of neighborhood youths, male/female/nonbinary, aged 13-18.