Theatre

Is God Is is the second production of Oakland Theater Project’s 2023 Season: History vs. Hope. OTP’s 2023 Season is a six-production lineup featuring groundbreaking new plays, re-imagined classic dramas, and the company’s first musical. The shows wrestle with the paradoxical tension between history and hope in today’s world. “If what the poets and philosophers tell us is true, and history is a story from which we can never fully escape, perhaps hope is the force that gives us the freedom to try,” said OTP Co-Artistic Director Michael Socrates Moran. “As we continue to face enormous uncertainty and profound disillusionment, theater, as a realm of illusion, has a role to play in how we might choose hope in a world that often seems committed to repeating history.”

About Oakland Theater Project:

Oakland Theater Project, formerly Ubuntu Theater Project, seeks to serve and heal the polarization and de-facto segregation in our community. The Oakland Theater Project was founded in 2012 by Michael Socrates Moran, William Hodgson, and Colin Mandlin in Oakland, CA. The Oakland Theater Project produces year-round professional theater for Oakland and the Bay Area is committed to creating compelling works of art that unearth the human condition and unite diverse audiences through revelatory and exquisite theater. Building on its ongoing tradition of offering pay-what-you-can tickets to every performance, Oakland Theater Project continues its commitment to radical inclusivity with pay-what-you-can subscriptions for the season, with sliding scale tickets for every performance. To subscribe, donate, or learn more, the public can call 510.646.1126 or visit oaklandtheaterproject The play livestreams and is available on demand beginning April 15, 7:30 PM PT

April 12, 2023, Wanda’s Picks continues its conversation with principles: Tanika Baptiste (Angie/She); Rolanda D. Bell (Anaia); Anthony Rollins-Mullens (Scotch/Man) about Oakland Theater Project’s Bay Area Premiere: “Is God Is,” by Aleshea Harris, directed by William Hodgson, Thursday-Saturday, 7:30 PM PT; Sundays at 2 PM PT March 31-April 23.

William Thomas Hodgson directs Oakland Theater Project’s Bay Area Premiere of Aleshea Harris’ multi-award-winning play “Is God Is.” After becoming a smash hit Off-Broadway in 2018 and a runaway success in London’s West End, this contemporary epic is finally making its Bay Area debut. Wanda’s Picks hosts a conversation April 5, 2023.

Is God Is, A Review

It’s the BAY AREA PREMIERE of Aleshea Harris’s play, “Is God Is” directed by William Hodgson.  After becoming a smash hit Off-Broadway in 2018 and a runaway success in London’s West End, this contemporary epic is finally making its Bay Area debut.

Is God Is Review
by Wanda Sabir

I’d been looking forward to seeing this work. Since I have been attending theatre livestreamed I have to wait almost to the end of the run to see a work. Theatre for a New City as in NYC is the only theater I know that streams opening night and every play, live. I think that’s really cool. I love attending plays there because over the run, the work changes. The last play I attended was Ishmael Reed’s The Conductor, as in Underground Railroad 2023, passengers South Asian and Chinese. The Conductors Pullman Porters, no seriously, Black people.

I am so happy Oakland Theater Project (OTP) and the Aurora Theatre stream quite a few of their productions. I really miss live theatre. I wish I had enough money to give them air filters which would make the air safer for me to attend. So anyhow, Sat., April 15, I was in front of my computer watching this story of revenge. Twin girls, Anaia and Racine (actors Rolanda D. Bell and Jamella Cross) burned while three years old in a fire set by their father are raised by the state. When we meet them, Cross’s “Racine” has gotten a letter from a mother she thought dead.

Imagine that?!

At 21, the summons was like a command from God. The girls in the Northeast wilderness traveling home to a Jim Crow postmodern BLM southern town where they meet their mama in a nursing home who is dying or at least she says she is. The crime – being burned alive, is horrific and for 18 years “SHE” who is bedridden has been waiting for these girls to extract vengeance.

Tanika Baptiste’s “She” is the lord and the girls are her flock. “Bring me a piece of him,” she tells them.

The biblical references are a littered liturgy from David and his slingshot to Racine putting a rock in Anaia’s sock. It is a pretty effective weapon we know direct from Goliath, but it takes guts. Racine has enough guts for two. The brutality was up close, so retribution is also a sort of moral hand to hand combat. Anaia is gentle to Racine “the cute one’s” simmering viciousness. Cross’s “Racine” is angry. Her breath sparks.

The buried memories unexplained that haunted Bell’s “Anaia” of her mother dancing in fire and the confusion, do not make her want to kill anyone. She is slow to boil.

Mama looks like a monster, when they lift her blankets. It’s Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment all over again, only this mother who walked away (from a bad relationship), got a restraining order, wasn’t safe. The ex-husband broke into her house and set her on fire. Poured gasoline on her. Dropped a match and left his little girls in the bathroom with her.

It is a crazy story I believe because it happened to me and to my mother. (Our wounds are hidden.) My mother said the San Francisco police told her when she asked for protection, to take a walk around the block and go back home.

My Daddy sent a one-way bus ticket to the welfare department and the county cut my mother’s aid. She lost her housing. The state did not ask her if she wanted to go to San Francisco to meet a fugitive. The beatings which started in New Orleans before I was born continued in San Francisco.

Saturday night at OTP I felt like I was at a film where the Black women finally win. The cowboy loses. God might be able to handle vengeance but two young women . . . well it reignites trauma. What was inaudible and unanticipated has feet. It moves. It lives.

Yes.

In the end, battle-fatigued-Anaia asks her mother, is she happy now? Does she have peace, because I think Anaia’s still trying to figure out the WHAT just happened?  Who is she now?

We are not our worse experience. The sins of the father were not theirs, Racine and Anaia’s to resolve, but Mama couldn’t walk. Right?

It was such a nice day too 18 years ago. The girls were eating pear slices while their mom cooked dinner and the monster, a shadow comes inside and disrupts and almost destroys their young lives. God finishes them off later.

I think about reconstructive surgery and why Anaia does not have it nor her mom. This is the present and such treatment exists. Everything is a metaphor here. What is motherloss? What does it mean to belong? What does one do with unarticulated rage?

Rage is fire.

It was such a nice day visiting with a mother they did not know they had. Perhaps she will look at Anaia’s face without pity, without horror. Perhaps. They do not hug. Racine and Anaia are no longer alone, yet they do not anticipate the poison festering in the veins of this woman in the bed before them. Is SHE God or is SHE Satan? What kind of antihero journey is this?

What a mother! She is big. She fills the room. She eats their lives. Her girls are captivated. We get the feeling that this bedridden woman knows all about them.  Was she waiting for them to grow up so they could weigh her demand as adults? Did she belief at 21 they would believe they had a choice?

The cast is excellent as they switch personas– not so the twin girls; however, everyone else is a twin. “Is God Is” is a psychological thriller with twists.

Tanika Baptiste is a compelling “She.” The girls’ mother is rational the way crazy sounds reasonable when it isn’t. Anthony Rollins-Mullens plays “Man”, the villain, so well. He has a reasonable sounding voice. It is dark when he shows up and fear is in the theatre. However, Anaia ignores it. She listens to her father’s voice. It is soothing. He reaches out his hand to her. He shares his story. Anaia catches his lies. He restarts. He says what happened is God’s fault. She wouldn’t let him “hold her.”

What does that mean?

I have no empathy for God the father. He is crazy. His insanity calculated. Kill him! I think aloud. I am at home in my kitchen. I can say this.

The killing spree is quick. Like Thelma and Louise, the twin sisters drive cross-country and look for their father. He lives in the suburbs in a house on a hill. Yes, there is a manicured garden too. It’s kind of hard to believe such a person exists, but he lives without remorse. He sees nothing wrong and we have hints that the current wife might have something to fear.

Can a person start over in a new place with a rotten seed? Can a rotten seed grow a healthy life? Evil and goodness lie parallel. Suffering is present too in equal doses. The girls survived. We get a sense that they will be okay and then this letter arrives. We hear so much about Man so that when he shows up, he’s almost ethereal otherworldly. Perhaps hell is his abode?

“What we won’t do, we do for love” or so the song goes. “We do for love, what we would not do.” These girls who thought they were alone have family now. A mama and a daddy. There are more revelations in Beverly Hills which I will not spoil for you.

Family. This is big. What will Racine and Anaia do for love?

Go see the play and find out. It is a tightly sewn 90-minute drama directed by William Thomas Hodgson with an amazing cast: Tanika Baptiste, Jamella Cross, Rolanda D. Bell, Devin Cunningham, Anthony Rollins-Mullen.

The theatre is intimate, so the story sits in your lap. You walk in empty and leave staggering. Drink plenty of water before you arrive. You will need it to dose the fire it ignites.

“Is God Is” continues, Thursday-Sunday, at Oakland Theater Project through April 23. The Oakland Theater Project is in the FLAX art & design building, Downtown Oakland, 1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way.  Box Office: 510.646.1126 boxoffice@oaklandtheaterproject.org LIVESTREAM Tickets to give you a high-quality Livestream Video on Demand: April 16–23

Celebrate Coretta Scott King (b. 4/27) in a new film

IN-PERSON REGISTRATION

ZOOM REGISTRATION

Questions? Please email worldhouse@stanford.edu

Tarot in Pandemic Closing Ceremony, April 15, 2023, 5:00 PM PT

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/tarot-in-pandemic-and-revolution-what-do-you-dream-for-the-future-tickets-611347927107

The program includes

Music by Guillermo Galindo

Poetry by Agneta Falk & Jahan Khalighi 

Tarot reading by MK Chavez

Interactive Mandala Art by Nancy Hom with a little help by Adrian

DJ music by WAM (Woman Audio Mission)

Africa in Berkeley, Sat., April 8
Listen to a LIVELY conversation with Fely and Tosin Wed., April 5, 11 AM PT on YouTube.com/wandaspicks

Watch interview with Fely and Tosin on Wanda’s Picks Show

Circle of Peace, Saturday, April 8@ Lake Merritt in Oakland

Reparations

International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

A-WAKE, A Virtual Memorial for Robert Henry Johnson

From the Wanda’s Picks Archives 16th Annual MAAFA Commemoration
Listen to an interview with Robert Henry Johnson in conversation with Juanita Brown, producer, “Traces of the Trade,” from 2011 and Dr. Marcus “Adeshima” Penn, physician, yoga teacher, health consultant. Robert talks about a play he has written which will have a staged reading at the African American Art and Culture Complex. He explores the stories of African ancestors along the waterways between the West Coast of Africa and the Western Hemisphere. The literal bones that floated then lie on the sands on the bottom of the oceans. These are the stories we haven’t been able to hear. Perhaps Robert now swims with those spirits?

Other Memorial Celebrations of RHJ’s Life are April 8, 12 noon-3 p.m. PT @ Zaccho Dance Theatre in San Francisco and May 27 @ The African American Art and Cultural Center. If you would like to share a photo of Robert for the Zaccho gathering please email afiya@zaccho.org

Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer @TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, March 8-April 2

Watch an interview with Greta Oglesby with Wanda Sabir about this role as civil rights icon, Fannie Lou Hamer

Here is the retreat schedule (3:00 pm – 6:00 pm PT):

Introduction — Laila Narsi, LCSW, Circles of Practice Co-Coordinator, Host

3:00 pm PT – Retreat session led by CMSC Co-Founder Kristin Neff

4:00 pm PT – Retreat session led by Sydney Spears, PhD, CMSC DEIB Director

5:00 pm PT – Retreat session led by Angelike Dexter, JD

Please check World Time Buddy to confirm the time the program begins where you live. 

Watch here:
If for some reason you aren’t able to log on, you can also go to the YouTube channel where the session will be live-streamed. https://www.youtube.com/centerformindfulselfcompassion

Ishmael Reed’s The Conductor @Theater for a New City (also streams live) March 9-26

Tarot in Pandemic, An Interview with Adrian Arias

The inaugural show of Tarot in Pandemic and Revolution will be exhibited at CAST (Community Arts Stabilization Trust), 447 Minna Street in San Francisco and simultaneously celebrating their 10-year anniversary and Spring/Vernal Equinox 2023. (Photo credit: La Pena Cultural Center website.)

The preview will be on Thursday, March 16, 2023, 

The opening events will be on Saturday, March 25, 2023

The closing event is April 15

The opening event on March 25 will kick off with Adrian’s traditional Illusion procession that will lead participants to the event space where we will have the land acknowledgement followed by a space and exhibition blessing, live music, poetry, dance performances, mural-making, tarot readings, and an Illusion Show.

Townhall at Dublin Women’s Prison on Sexual Abuse Victims of the State