Review: Black Western revenge road trip plays on Oakland stage

Revenge stories are a time-honored subgenre in film, but they’re less common in theater, at least since the heyday of the revenge tragedy in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

Oakland Theater Project’s latest production, “Is God Is,” is more reminiscent of revenge Western and horror flicks than Elizabethan drama, but it’s also lushly poetic and dreamlike, almost mythic in style. The captivating play by Aleshea Harris was an Obie Award-winning 2018 off-Broadway and West End hit, and OTP’s staging is its Bay Area premiere.

Twin African American sisters badly burned in a fire as children are summoned to the bedside of the mother whom they thought died in the fire 18 years ago. She tells them her dying wish is for them to find their father, who set the fire on purpose, and kill him and anyone who gets in their way. The twins figure that this mother they never knew must be God, because she made them, so they take this mission as a commandment.

Theirs is an epic quest made compellingly intimate in the Oakland Theater Project staging directed by co-founder and co-artistic director William Hodgson, who’s also starring in Aurora Theatre Company’s current production of “Cyrano.”

The sisters, who usually call each other simply “twin,” are fascinatingly dissimilar in look, temperament and personality.

Her face burn-scarred in Marina Polakoff’s effective makeup, Rolanda D. Bell’s Anaia is timid, sluggish and lachrymose, often saying she’s “too tired” to deal with whatever latest trauma she has to face, while her sister simply dismisses her as “emotional.”

Called “the rough one that’s still got some pretty to her,” Jamella Cross’ Racine is plucky and blithely bloodthirsty. Her scars most prominent on her arms, ’Cine is as irrepressibly upbeat and energetic as ’Naia is relentlessly gloomy and sluggish.

They sometimes narrate themselves in third person, almost like a folk tale, especially toward the beginning. New characters often do so as well, especially when they’re first introduced.

Tanika Baptiste is amusingly forthright as the hoarse-voiced, bedridden mother, unrepentant for her years of deception while her kids cycled through abusive foster homes. She’s also comically demanding as the father’s new wife, accustomed to a fancy life in the suburbs.

The father has a new pair of spoiled teenage twins, equipped by costume designer Arielle Powell in comically matching green and white outfits. Devin Cunningham’s Riley is sarcastic and arugula-loving, and Anthony Rollins-Mullens’ giddy Scotch writes bad poetry with puppy-dog enthusiasm. Cunningham also plays a haughty, drunken lawyer, and Rollins-Mullens is chillingly calm and smooth as the swaggering, cowboy-hatted object of their quest.

The story takes place in the present; there’s talk early on about a man Anaia met online. And yet there’s an almost timeless, folkloric quality to the story. As they travel from the “Dirty South” to the California desert, they’re not using any phones. They just drive from place to place and show up for the next showdown.

Harris’s play deftly mixes humor and tragedy, contemplativeness and violence. Her use of poetic repetition and self-narration is as deft as her clever, incisive dialogue.

Hodgson’s deft staging leans into that blend of the down-to-earth and the lyrical. The audience is right up against the action in Oakland Theater Project’s cozy performance space around back of FLAX art & design in downtown Oakland.

The stage is mostly bare in Karla Hargrave’s minimal set, occasional set pieces emerging from a weathered curtain that only turns diaphanous to reveal more scenery towards the climax. Alexa Burrell’s projections provide cinematic chapter titles, and Stephanie Anne Johnson’s lighting accentuates the mood and marks violence with flashes of red.

The blood spatters themselves are milky white, somewhat reminiscent of the use of white paint in the company’s production of “The Crucible” last fall. Somehow that dash of unreality makes the violence more stark and striking.

It’s a beautifully written, directed and performed tale that’s as jarring as it is captivating, and a tantalizing taste of a unique voice from whom with any luck we’ll have an opportunity to hear more in the future.

Contact Sam Hurwitt at [email protected], and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.

‘IS GOD IS’

By Aleshea Harris, presented by Oakland Theater Project

Through: April 23

Where: FLAX art & design, 1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland

Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission

Tickets: $10-$55; www.oaklandtheaterproject.com