Brother/Sister act
Steppenwolf steps into black theater with DePaul grad Tarell Alvin McCraney's three-part cycle.
The primordial Chicago ensemble, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, was for its first few decades very white. It’s something artistic director Martha Lavey is acutely aware of. At a press event three years ago to introduce six new ensemble members, including African-American actors Alana Arenas, Jon Michael Hill, Ora Jones and James Vincent Meredith, she was asked why it had taken so damn long. (K. Todd Freeman had, up until then, been the sole nonwhite member out of 35.)
Her answer was remarkably forthright: Steppenwolf has a way of getting to know artists over a long period, and in serving the needs of 34 white ensemble members, it hadn’t yet found that opportunity with artists of color. “Rather than a particular agenda, what we trust are artistic collaborations,” Lavey says now.
The company has found many of those opportunities away from its main stage, through collaborations in its funkier Garage space or in the Steppenwolf for Young Adults series, which has produced adaptations of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. “Steppenwolf for Young Adults, our Garage series—we see those as points of entry into the theater,” Lavey says. “It’s there you’re going to see the artists newest to Steppenwolf, so of course that’s going to immediately demonstrate more diversity, both in the types of work and the artists. The hope is that establishes a relationship that gets built upon and finds its way to our largest audience through the Subscription Series.”
This week, you could say, that hope pays off. The company takes on an ambitious exploration of African-American themes with Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brother/Sister Plays, Steppenwolf’s first major production by an African-American writer since the additions to the ensemble. It’s also the widely praised 29-year-old playwright’s first Chicago production. A full-length play, In the Red and Brown Water, alternates with a slate of two shorter works, The Brothers Size and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet; to get the full effect, audiences must attend two performances.
The three plays share a setting (a small community on the Gulf Coast) and some characters, as well as an appropriation of West-African Yoruba mythology and a penchant for self-narration. In Red and Brown, patterned on Federico García Lorca’s Yerma, teenage athlete Oya seeks a path to her dreams. Oya’s suitor Ogun is also at the center of The Brothers Size, fighting for the soul of his brother Oshoosi, just released from prison; the title character in Marcus is the teenage son of Oshoosi’s cell mate, coming to terms with his budding sexuality. New York’s Public Theater produced The Brothers Size in 2007, while McCraney was completing his M.F.A. at Yale, prompting The New York Times to declare “there is evidence…to suggest that he has a long career ahead of him.” When the Public produced the complete set last November, some reviewers eagerly cited August Wilson’s influence, noting that McCraney served as the late playwright’s assistant at Yale.
McCraney laughs off claims of mentorship. “I got him coffee,” he says, taking a break from an early rehearsal last month at Steppenwolf’s administrative building. “People try to make it seem like there’s something else. I got him coffee and cigarettes.”
“I loved him,” the playwright adds. “The generosity that he showed me when I was at school, it’s deeper than anyone can say.” But he finds declarations that he’s “the next so-and-so” limiting. “I feel bad for the day when I write a play that’s really not [like Wilson’s work],” he says, “when an audience comes to a play of mine looking for August Wilson and they see dick, ass, gays, convicts and drag queens, and they’re like, That’s not August Wilson!”
Brother/Sister came to Steppenwolf via one of those trusted artistic collaborations. Director and ensemble member Tina Landau has been by McCraney’s side for much of the young writer’s stratospheric rise, ever since she directed him as an actor in 2004’s Theatrical Essays (part of the Garage series, naturally). She’s since directed his plays in a number of cities; Lavey says it was Landau who proposed the project here.
“My revelation has been that Tarell and I come from these crazy-different backgrounds—practically, logistically, economically, whatever,” says Landau, who directs all three plays. “And our values about what we treasure in the theater, in art, and therefore extended, in life, are so similar.”
McCraney’s compelling back story has undeniably been part of his appeal, to judge from media profiles written about him in New York, London (where he’s currently International Playwright in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company) and elsewhere, which have tended to focus breathlessly on his difficult childhood in Miami’s Liberty City projects.
There, he shuttled between the homes of his devoutly religious father and his crack-addicted mother (who passed away from AIDS-related complications while he was at DePaul), all while dodging gay-baiting insults and attacks from the neighborhood’s rougher elements. Adding to the struggle, Hurricane Andrew hit Miami when McCraney was 11, destroying the family’s possessions.
McCraney has said in numerous interviews that theater gave him a lifeline during his troubled childhood. A school counselor steered him to a youth improv program; he later attended high school at Miami’s selective New World School of the Arts. Arenas, who appears in two of The Brother/Sister Plays, was a classmate there and at DePaul.
McCraney describes the stories as archetypal, but “what is interesting to me is placing them in this Gulf Coast and in the projects and amongst people of color,” he says.
Steppenwolf can finally demonstrate it shares that interest. Lavey cites McCraney and Tanya Saracho (who adapted Mango Street) as writers the company would like to continue to cultivate: “Those relationships are forged; those are relationships we’ll keep pursuing.”
Now in previews, The Brother/Sister Plays opens Sunday 31 at Steppenwolf.
