According to Tarell Alvin McCraney, “20 years of investigation have not solved all the mysteries” of “The Brothers Size,” his breakout play from 2007. That’s not to say he hasn’t tried.
The play, a stirring calypso of a modern re-entry drama filled with West African folklore, which is now running at the Shed in Manhattan through Sept. 28, centers on the characters Ogun Size and his younger brother Oshoosi Size. Both are dealing with the aftermath of imprisonment.
“On one hand there’s absolutely something familiar about it,” McCraney said of his play during a virtual call in the midst of rehearsals last month. “There is a kind of Rosetta Stone that helps me relearn why I love telling stories. But on another hand, there are new moments that come up and that is thrilling to me.”
It does not take long to notice McCraney has a penchant for this sort of vivid imagery when reflecting on the past. It’s there when he speaks as it is in his writing — the sage confidence of a man as curious about his present as he is his past.
Some nostalgia is only natural considering McCraney’s decades-long history with both the play and one of its stars, André Holland. The pair were introduced by a professor during Holland’s third year of acting school at New York University, and the relationship stuck. Throughout our virtual conversation with the cast at rehearsal, neither hesitated to call the other “brother.”
“I’m just grateful to this brother for giving me and so many of us the space to have a career that we can actually track our own development in,” Holland said. “Often, the American theater doesn’t give us that.”
McCraney’s calling came early in his 20s while pursuing a playwriting degree at Yale School of Drama (a department he would eventually lead). There, he encountered an Ìjálá or, a poetic chant dedicated to the West African deity Ogun, that read: “Ogun’s brother is missing. Ogun builds tools to find him.”
These two lines, fewer than 15 syllables, opened the floodgates of inspiration. There on the pale shores of Connecticut, he began to weave Yoruba cosmology into “The Brothers Size,” which would become part of his renowned trilogy, “The Brother/Sister Plays.”
The result is a spinning meditation on survival, protection, and fraternal love. When a fully staged production of the triptych, which includes “In The Red and Brown Water” and “Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet,” premiered at the Public Theater in Manhattan in 2009, the New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it “something rare in the theater: a new, authentically original vision.”
Playing the ambling Oshoosi in that buzzy cast was Holland. For the Shed production, he tries on Ogun’s shoes for size.
It’s an Off Broadway return for the two men who, in addition to stage work together for the trilogy, have collaborated twice onscreen: Barry Jenkins’s stunning Oscar winner “Moonlight” (2016) and Steven Soderbergh’s sporty film “High Flying Bird” (2019).
“We’ve done two movies together now, but the plays really saved my career, gave me a career. I think that’s true of a lot of people I know who, without Tarell’s work, probably would not have found their way into the American theater,” Holland admitted. “I can map my career with Tarell’s work.”
And it’s a homecoming for the play itself, following regional and international productions, including at the Young Vic in London, the Steppenwolf in Chicago and the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles last year — McCraney’s first season as artistic director. The Shed production is in partnership with the Geffen, where rehearsals were held last month.
Throughout “The Brothers Size,” the elder Ogun steadies himself in labor as the owner of a car shop and tries to order the idle Oshoosi into joining him, but temptation comes in the form of Elegba, Oshoosi’s friend and confidant from prison. These are ordinary men with simple hungers, but their names carry connections to the gods — the orishas of iron, hunting, crossroads.
McCraney comes back to the show in a new role as well, as co-director alongside Bijan Sheibani, who helmed earlier productions. Though 20 years of awards and appointments have proven kind to the play’s auteur, it’s this artistic repatriation with familiar collaborators that’s finally satiating the 22-year-old Tarell that simply adored theater.
“That kid has not gone anywhere. He often is like ‘Yo, when do we get to do plays again?’” McCraney joked, but the truth of that desire cuts across our spotty video call like lightning.
Though he remains humble about the co-director title, largely chalking it up to a matter of scheduling balance with Sheibani’s conflicts, his cast insists otherwise. “Having watched you over many years,” Holland directs to his friend, “you’ve always been a director. Your writing is so clear and specific, there is direction embedded in the writing itself.”
Malcolm Mays, who plays Elegba, echoes the sentiment. “Every composer doesn’t conduct; every conductor doesn’t compose. But this man does both,” Mays said.
Two decades and a world removed from the Obama-era social climate in which the play debuted, “The Brothers Size” will find itself speaking to another generation of audiences. There are lines that may hit the ear differently.
At one point of conflict with his brother, Oshoosi, played by Alani Ilongwe, says “I know I was once in prison. I am out and I am on probation. Damn it man. I ain’t trying to drive to Fort Knox. I ain’t about to scale the capital.” Now when audiences hear that word, which McCraney penned long ago, they might take it as a reference to the Capitol riots in 2021.
And yet so much will also sound the same. “Unfortunately, parts of the plays are still relevant. The system still rips families apart, still deprives people of their humanity in ways that make it hard for them to reattain that in the world,” McCraney said.
In addition to the Ìjálá, McCraney’s impulse to write the play came from his brother’s incarceration. Afterward, he did not get the same sibling back — a specific grief felt by millions of American families. To dramatize that pain is to acknowledge it. Oshoosi, too, can’t escape the mark of prison. Shame clings to his back. (The Geffen production offered free tickets to people impacted by incarceration through an initiative that McCraney started; the Shed will offer free and discounted tickets to various community organizations.)
Plays like “The Brothers Size” are, after all, service work — intentional in their humanization of beings we might otherwise erase. The brunt of that is felt by the actors night after night. Mays, who mentions his own time in the system as a juvenile and an adult, notes that McCraney’s writing requires actors to meet it with internal work, not just craft.
“It makes demands from the crevices of your character. So if you haven’t done work internally, this work is not for you,” Mays said, adding he was full from performing it, yet also “depleted every night.”
That demand is embedded in the play’s patakí-like framework, in the griot-style recitation of story and, crucially, in its score. Grunts, hums, impassioned soul music covers help prop that poetic register McCraney favors up against the very real social truths he’s reflecting. The show’s musician Munir Zakee describes it as “a way of seeing ourselves outside of ourselves.” Neither music nor mythology aims to dismiss what’s real, they are tools to manage it — ways to hold the weight.
And that is the motif of “The Brothers Size”: holding weight. Ogun for his brother, Oshoosi for himself, the play for its audience, and vice versa. Twenty years on, McCraney’s words still honor the ways men carry one another through mess and loss. And the poet himself, ever aware of the play’s doubleness, still cares about every sentence.
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