‘Brothers Size’ follows odyssey of 3 black men
In the afterglow of last year’s “Moonlight,” Tarell Alvin McCraney is best known as the guy who shared Oscar honors for best adapted screenplay. But before the 37-year-old McCraney picked up his hardware in Tinseltown, he’d already won a MacArthur “genius” grant for his exceptional work as a playwright.
The centerpiece of that growing body of work is “The Brother/Sister” plays, a trilogy set in a fictional town on the edge of the Louisiana bayou. While often presented together, each play stands on its own. The best of them, “The Brothers Size,” opens this week at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, in a production directed by Marti Gobel.
It will be the first fully professional production of a McCraney play in Milwaukee. But it’s not our first exposure to McCraney’s stage work.
Three years ago, Gobel directed “In the Red and Brown Water,” in a collaboration between Marquette University and Gobel’s now-defunct UPROOTED Theatre. It landed on my top ten list of best plays seen anywhere in Wisconsin in 2014. Three months later, Gobel and UPROOTED staged a memorable reading at Next Act of “The Brothers Size.”
As "Size" begins, younger brother Oshoosi Size (Andrew Muwonge) and his friend Elegba (Marcus Causey) have just been released from prison. Oshoosi is crashing with older brother Ogun Size (Travis A. Knight), who owns a small auto repair shop.
“Ogun is very solid and a hard worker, intent on being responsible and taking care of everything,” Gobel said during a pre-rehearsal interview. “Oshoosi wants to go out and see the world. Elegba tempts Oshoosi to explore. He’s slithery, and he can bite. But he’s also beautiful and smooth. His ultimate goal is to help Oshoosi find his best self.”
Gobel likened Elegba to Kevin in “Moonlight”; while flawed himself, Elegba nevertheless challenges Oshoosi to find and follow his path, in a world where black men’s dreams are continually deferred and damaged.
Finding the God within
As is true with the characters in “Moonlight,” the trio in “The Brothers Size” are all presented as so much more than their poverty and their rap sheets. True to their names – drawn from the Yoruba mythology that’s integral to African American folklore – each of them is both a flesh-and-blood person and a god.
“McCraney’s world involves African Americans who are gods that occasionally forget themselves and their true path, much like the gods in Greek mythology,” Gobel said. “And by dwelling within us, these gods connect us to our Yoruba ancestors, who continue to watch over us even if they can’t physically be with us.
“That means that on the north side of Milwaukee, there are gods walking among us that we don’t see. We make faulty assumptions based on where we are in the city – or based on the color of someone’s skin – regarding who a person is and how much they know.
“But if you really hold tight to the idea that the gods can be in us and around us and guide us, life’s moments of realism would continually be informed by moments of mysticism.”
Gobel’s production will reinforce this sense of the often unseen gods living around and within us through a fourth character. Even as he embodies the Yoruba god Egungun, Drummer Jahmés Tony Finlayson will be dressed as a homeless man sitting upstage, making drums from found objects such as trash cans, bunt pans and bowls.
“I don’t know how you could do these plays without a live drummer,” Gobel said, noting that she’d also used live, onstage drumming in her production of “In the Red and Brown Water.” “McCraney writes with such a rhythm, in poetic language that has such evident emotion. The drum accentuates that. It drives the story forward.”
Pursuing the dream
That story travels backward to Africa and forward toward a day when the gods dwelling within every black man might stand tall. “I just want to find something like you got,” Oshoosi says to his big brother, who loves fixing cars and being a mechanic. “Go find you,” Ogun tells him, even as he worries that setting his little brother free means losing him.
Taken on its most modest, realistic level, that push and pull between brothers is a coming-of-age story, involving the tension between family and freedom, the past and the future, home and the open road – symbolized, here, by the car in which Elegba and Oshoosi go cruising.
But such journeys in McCraney are never just physical.
Such travels also involve a state of mind, often best seen in this piece through characters’ dreams. True to a writer who isn’t afraid to be surrealistic, those dreams will transport us into a mystical realm – worlds removed from a set that will prominently feature Ogun’s garage as well as a bus-stop bench and an urban park’s bleachers.
Patrons can purchase seats allowing them to watch the play from the onstage bench or bleachers; the rest of us will be enveloped by a large tree, akin to a weeping willow and stretched like a canopy over the audience. “Everybody will be sitting under a tree, on a bench, or in bleachers, included in this world and challenged to see it differently,” Gobel said.
But even as we travel to the fictionalized community of San Pere, Louisiana – a name underscoring all the missing fathers in McCraney’s work – the men living there will be dreaming of Africa. McCraney sets his play in the “distant present”; as Gobel recognizes, he thereby imagines a utopian future that also incorporates – rescues, really – what’s best about the past.
As we spoke, Gobel invoked that promised land by referring to a beautiful moment in the play during which Oshoosi tells his older brother about a book he’d stumbled upon while in prison.
The book is filled with pictures of Madagascar – “the people, the places, the water, the eating, the ground the earth.” All of it, Oshoosi tells Ogun, reminds him of himself, no longer surrounded by “faces telling me what’s wrong with me.”
“I need to be out there looking for the me’s,” Oshoosi says. “He got something to tell me man. Something about me that I don’t know.”
As with “Moonlight” and so many of his plays, McCraney is continually searching to remember and revive all that these characters once knew and have now forgotten about themselves, given all the ways their heritage and history have been broken or bent. Like Oshoosi, he’s driven by a utopian impulse, involving black America’s ongoing journey toward the promised land.
“This road is rough,” we’re continually told in the prologue to the play. But “The Brothers Size” walks it with hope and love, in some of the most gorgeously poetic language written by any American playwright this side of Tennessee Williams.
“We’re already on the path,” Gobel said. “And McCraney’s poetry keeps you going, in a particular direction.”