The Essentialisn’t
Written and performed by Eisa Davis
HERE Arts Center | 145 6th Avenue, New York, NY 10013
September 10 - September 28
Photo Credit by Daniel J. Vasquez
Eisa Davis opens her world premiere production The Essentialisn’t at HERE with a gesture as visually arresting as it is symbolically saturated: she submerges herself, quite literally, into a transparent tank of water—a glass sarcophagus of sorts, upright and unforgiving, evoking both the spectacle of the escape artist and the solemnity of the entombed. There she remains, suspended, bobbing gently beneath the surface, her head just barely breaking the plane of the water, as she sings in delicate counterpoint to a looped recording of a Mende funeral song—ancestral lament as sonic invocation. It is a blunt image, yes—but also a blunt force: a metaphor laid bare, deliberately undraped. This tank becomes a vessel of paradox: clarity and confinement, transparency and entrapment. It is, unmistakably, a visual corollary for the categorical violence of bureaucratic taxonomy—the suffocating boxes we are compelled to check on censuses, applications, and surveys: Race? Gender? Identity? The water may shimmer, but the parameters remain rigid.
In this opening tableau, Davis offers herself up as both subject and symbol: a Black woman confined in a container that can never hope to encompass her multitudes. Her body becomes the site of resistance and revelation. There is no subtlety here, nor is there meant to be. She invites us to confront the absurdity—and cruelty—of a culture that insists on defining the undefinable. And yet, the question that lingers, even as she begins to move again, is whether water—fluid, formless, ungraspable—might offer not just metaphorical resonance but a form of liberation. Can the very thing that encases her also dissolve the boundaries that seek to fix her in place? Is this immersion an act of submission—or of escape? Davis never answers directly. She doesn’t need to. She surfaces, breathes, sings. The image dissolves, but its implications ripple throughout the rest of the evening. What she initiates in that tank is not just a performance—it is a provocation, a baptism, a dare.
Let us begin with a question—not just any question, but a challenge, posed by Davis in a tone equal parts inquiry and indictment: “Can you be Black and not perform?” Her answer—delivered not as speech, but as song, plucked from her own keyboard—is a clear, simple, resonant “No.” And from this moment, we are off. Off into the shape-shifting, genre-defying space that is The Essentialisn’t, a title that wears its awkwardness like armor and dares you to find a neat category into which this work might fit. Spoiler: you will fail. Spectacularly.
This is not a play, though it has characters and drama. Nor is it strictly a concert, though music pulses through it like blood. It is not a memoir, though it draws from Davis’s life. It is not performance art—except, oh, it absolutely is. The Essentialisn’t resists classification the way Davis resists essentialism itself. It is a theatrical act of refusal, of complication, of interruption. It is a genre fugitive, which seems to be precisely the point.
Before we even enter the theater proper, Davis begins her seduction. A montage of Black performers from the 1930s flickers before us on a screen—tap dancers and jazz musicians who, despite their genius, were often allowed on stage only in roles built on caricature. This archival footage is intercut with a contemporary image: Davis, submerged in a tank of water. And before a single word is spoken live, we pass through an anteroom transformed into an art installation—a museum of Black artistic identity, complete with tap shoes, books suspended from wire, and a plexiglass ballot box where audience members are asked to define, in one word, “the essence of Black women.” What a trap! What a challenge! What an absurd, sincere, impossible, vital question.
Then, Davis emerges, not metaphorically—literally, from the tank. In silence. Wet, theatrical, alive. She dons a dress made of human hair, that most symbolically loaded of materials. Then she sings. And from that point on, The Essentialisn’t becomes a densely layered, often nonlinear meditation on race, performance, gender, cultural memory, and the violent absurdity of expectations.
A pink neon sign is wheeled on stage: It reinforces “Can you be Black and not perform?” Over the course of 90 unpredictable, at times confounding minutes, Davis and her two co-conspirators, Jamella Cross and Princess Jacob, dubbed “The Sovereigns,” mask and unmask various words in the sentence. First “you” disappears. Then “not”. Then “perform”. Eventually we are left with a distilled mantra: “Black Form. It is a meditation in semiotics, yes—but also a visual poem about how language, like identity, is mutable, contingent, shaped by who’s doing the seeing.
Throughout, Davis navigates the paradox at the center of Black existence in America—the same paradox that haunted W.E.B. Du Bois in his formulation of double consciousness. As Davis makes plain through song, text, and movement, to be Black in America is to be both subject and object, seen and unseen, expected to be at once authentic and performative. And above all, understood—before you've said a word.
And yet Davis is not content with mere diagnosis. She dissects the problem, then satirizes it, then invites the audience to share in the performance of their own liberation. A brilliant sequence begins with a video of Black people singing the iconic opening line from Dreamgirls: “And I am telling you I’m not going.” The joke, of course, is that everyone thinks they know how it should sound—Jennifer Holliday or Jennifer Hudson, take your pick—but Davis dares to suggest that singing it badly may be the more radical act. Authenticity, it turns out, is another performance—one that has been weaponized against Black women in particular. If you can't sing like Aretha, are you even really you?
There’s a brutal honesty, too, in her anecdote about acting school—a lesson in institutionalized gaslighting, where two white teachers command her to stop performing, to just be, to have “a private moment in public,” only to then tell her she isn’t being “herself.” Not Black enough, but also too Black. A contradiction embedded in pedagogy, and in power.
For those who know Davis primarily from last year’s The Warriors concept album—her collaboration with Lin-Manuel Miranda—this might feel like a sideways step into the avant-garde. But it is, in truth, a continuation of a long, fiercely independent career. She is not merely a performer; she is also a composer and playwright (including a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama with Bulrusher, and an autobiographical play, Angela’s Mixtape, rooted in personal memory and political inheritance, that traces the formative years of young Eisa as she comes of age not only as an artist but as a consciousness-in-the-making—shaped, provoked, and, at times, dwarfed by the towering presence of her aunt, the indomitable Angela Davis. What she gives us in The Essentialisn’t is not cohesion, but confrontation. Not answers, but possibilities.
Davis, who not only serves as writer and performer but also takes the reins as director, demonstrates a discerning eye for the dramaturgy of space—understanding that intimacy, when treated with intention, can be just as potent as grandeur. Here, in a set that might easily be dismissed as modest—a compact, almost makeshift corner of the stage—she cultivates an atmosphere of startling immediacy. With the guidance of scenic consultant Peter Born, the physical environment becomes less a backdrop and more a container: a curated vessel in which vulnerability, memory, and performance can safely collide.
Yet it is through the alchemy of the design elements that this intimacy takes on a transcendent quality. Skye Mahaffie’s expansive video design does not merely project—it enfolds. Her work stretches beyond the boundaries of the literal set, wrapping the performance space in a visual tenderness that feels less like spectacle and more like memory rendered in motion. There is a tactility to it, as if the very air around the performers has been imbued with fragments of personal archive and cultural ghost. Meanwhile, Cha See’s lighting design bathes the entire enterprise in a mellow, honeyed glow, eschewing harshness in favor of a gentle radiance that seems to emanate from within the piece itself. Light becomes not only illumination but tone, texture, mood—at times almost a character in its own right, responsive and alive. Together, these elements form a visual language that deepens, rather than distracts from, the emotional and intellectual currents of Davis’s work. The result is a space that doesn’t merely frame the performance but partners with it—softly, deliberately, and with extraordinary care.
Does the show “work”? Not in the traditional sense. It is jagged. It is wet (literally, thematically, emotionally). Its pieces don’t quite fit, but they never feel arbitrary. It’s like a collage made with a scalpel and a prayer. Davis’ intelligence does not coddle. Her talent does not pander. If you are waiting to be entertained in the familiar sense, you might miss the point entirely.
And so, returning to her question: Can you be Black and not perform? It hangs in the air, on the wall, in the water. And in the end, Davis never fully answers it for us. She doesn’t have to. She’s already shown us that the asking is itself the form, the performance, the protest. This isn’t just The Essentialisn’t. It is the insistence that no one else gets to define what is essential. Not to her. Not to Black women. Not to art.
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Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on September 19, 2025. All rights reserved.