The Brother/Sister Plays

The course of massive young ambition doesn’t always run smooth. The 20-year-old Pico della Mirandola’s 900 Conclusions, combining Greek, Egyptian and Arabic wisdom, became the first printed book universally banned by the Catholic Church. So McCraney, 29, who aims in this four-hour-plus trilogy to synthesize West African Yoruba mythology, the contemporary situation of Louisiana bayou dwellers and vast swaths of theatrical history, might well have been apprehensive about his work’s reception.

But from its opening, as the ensemble cast of In the Red and Brown Water gathers onstage, up to the funereal conclusion of Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet, these plays, arriving in Chicago after an acclaimed debut last year at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre and New York’s Public, announce the arrival of a penetrating theatrical intelligence, given an impeccable and gorgeous staging by Landau and her cast and crew. It is a landmark event.

In the longer opening piece, which delineates the loves and disappointments of swift runner Oya (Alana Arenas), a familiar but deeply felt love triangle unravels against a tapestry of memorable neighborhood characters: the meddlesome Aunt Elegua (Jacqueline Williams), the mischievous Elegba (Glenn Davis). The DePaul and Yale alumnus uses gesture and Homeric tag lines to lend his characters, based on Yoruba deities, a legendary weight; Oya, for instance, the goddess of wind, is invariably invoked by the ensemble with a whoosh. At the same time, the characters inhabit an immediately recognizable contemporary U.S. The piece’s grisly end could come from either ancient tragedy or yesterday’s Sun-Times.

The Brothers Size, the apex of the trilogy, again employs the simplest of plots: the conflict between the ant and the grasshopper, or in this case responsible Ogun Size (K. Todd Freeman) and his insouciant, ex-con brother, Oshooshi (Phillip James Brannon). But in McCraney’s hands, this pen-sketch, hinging on a few simple incidents, becomes heartbreaking. The fury and desolation with which Ogun receives the news that Oshooshi has gotten himself in trouble with the law once again, and the brothers’ duet to Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” a reprieve before their final separation, have the gut-wrenching profundity of theater at its most accomplished. On its own, The Brothers Size has tragic heft; in conjunction with the other plays, which describe the full arc of Ogun’s sorrows, it’s a shard of obsidian, a three-dimensional blues.

Marcus lacks the intense drive of the other two pieces. Its central coming-out drama fits awkwardly with the mythic idiom of the trilogy, which is, as a whole, based on types, not psychologically nuanced characters. Marcus’s soliloquies of self-discovery seem surprisingly generic, given the sharp, specific speech that pervades The Brother/Sister Plays. Elsewhere, though, the final play shares the author’s fierce apprenticeship to language. McCraney treats words like both mysteries and clues, as when Elegba quibbles with a white shopkeeper over whether he “wants” candy he can’t afford in Red and Brown Water. In one indelible sequence from Marcus, McCraney offers a horrific etymology explaining why Southern gay black men are called “sweet.”

Steppenwolf’s ensemble cast members play McCraney’s trilogy with awesome skill and sensitivity. The Brechtian conceit by which they speak their own stage directions, a touch of self-conscious theatricality that heightens the ritual element, has them slipping in and out of character constantly and apparently without effort. Over the course of the plays, various physical characteristics—Davis’s smirk, Rodrick Covington’s broad grin, Ora Jones’s flashing eyes—take on the symbolic depth of the quasi-divine personages they play. Above all, though, the trilogy’s thread is held together by Freeman’s brilliant work as the stuttering, world-bearing, ultimately resigned Ogun. As he shambles to his missing brother’s burial, the cloud storms above him promising Katrina, he seems to gather within himself the whole of McCraney’s vibrant and suffering world.

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