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Subtitled "A play. A pageant. A ritual. A homegoing celebration," Aleshea Harris's What to Send Up When It Goes Down is among the most formally inventive and thematically charged stage works to emerge in recent decades.1 In a conversation with fellow playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Harris reflected on what inspired her to create the mold-breaking theatrical text. "I just wanted to do something that was activated, something an audience couldn't just passively experience," she explained. "The idea was to hold people accountable, be confrontational, let it be messy, let it be angry, and let it tread as absurdly as the idea that a Black person could be killed on camera unarmed and the person who killed them get away with it. Ihat is an absurd reality. I wanted to mirror that absurdity in the form of the play," she continued.2 As Harris's comments to Jacobs-Jenkins indicate, What to Send Up When It Goes Down both expects and demands a lot from its audiences. Chief among these expectations and demands is a willingness to reckon with the persistence of anti-Black racism and violence and, correspondingly, to imagine and engender possibilities for repair.
What to Send Up When It Goes Down articulates these aims and intentions for its audiences at the outset. Harris's script instructs that, as viewers wait to enter the performance space, the actor playing the character FOUR (all eight characters in the play arc given numbers between one and eight as names) should step forward to welcome them and "clarify a couple of things" (131). In The Movement Theatre Company's production, which was staged at theatres in New York, Washington, D.C., and the Greater Boston area between 2018 and 2021 under the direction of Whitney White, FOUR captured the crowd's attention by first enumerating several concerns about gratuitous state violence against Black people in the United States and acknowledging the tremendous psychological harm such violence continues to exact. FOUR then announces,"Let me be clear: this ritual is first and foremost for Black people. We are glad non-Black people are here. We welcome you but this piece was created and is expressed with Black folks in mind" (132). This, the audience soon discovers, is important because, as the character puts it, "It is not ollen that...